CP4E was Re: Deitel and Deitel Book...

[Ramkumar Kashyap]

I find that most introductory books approach programming in a 
non-intuitive manner and lose out on a big chunk of their audience. 
 Only a few of us that persevere, end up learning the language and even 
fewer go on to achieve "GURU" status. Why is this?

I have seen several posts on CLP and the newbie tutors list, where 
people mention that their first encounter with programming was in BASIC, 
COBOL, Pascal, Fortran.  They did not really make any progress, gave up 
on programming.  Now they are attempting once again, hoping things have 
become a little easier.

I would like to know how the pattern was set to teach programming 
languages.  You do an introductory program like "Hello World", learn how 
to compile and run it. Then jump into decision structures, loops, 
functions, etc.

This is extremely non-intuitive to most people.  Most 5,6,7 year olds 
can speak fluently in their native languages, but how many of them could 
tell you about vowels, consonants, nouns, verbs, adjectives.  In fact 
quite a few of them speak multiple languages, can easily differentiate 
sentence structures in those languages, but would be hard-pressed to 
give defintions of the above.

So how come in programming, we ALWAYS jump into the constructs of a 
language, rather than just doing, gaining proficiency and then 
understanding how it is put together?

I think that unless the approach to teaching Programming languages, is 
changed and follows the more universal style of teaching spoke language 
or verbal communication, Computer Programming for Everybody will remain 
a dream.

Just my .02 cents

Ramkumar

Curtis Jensen wrote:

> The only disappointing parts for me were:
> The cover, definitly didn't seem targeted to the college crowd, but 
> more to highschoolers.
> No chapters on extending Python with C.
> The XML chapters seemed to be an attempt to jump on the band wagon and 
> sell books.
>
> All in all, I think the book is well written.  The examples are 
> usefull enough to figure out what is going on without reading the 
> chapter (good for lazy programmers).  I lent it to a (non-programmer) 
> friend and he found it more useful than the O'Reilly Python book.
>
> Also, if your main intent for reviewing the book was for the money, 
> I'd suggest playing the lotto instead.  Don't be so arogant that you 
> think that your time is so precious as to complain about a temporary, 
> predeterimined, pay scale.  They were upfront in their monatary 
> compensation.  If you don't like it, don't review the book.
>