Slashdot Mirror

• - Development can be done on just about any device and operating system.
• - The language is easy to learn, yet powerful once you learn it.
• - You can write interesting programs straight away without having to spend a lot of time learning the tools.

Even with an easy language like Python, it helps to have a guide to get started. I'd recommend visiting http://inventwithpython.com/ch.... The author does a great job of walking you through everything you need to know to get started without any experience. Once you finish with the book, there are a number of great references on the web to take you further.

The Gardener and Perelman books already recommended by other commenters are good, as I can confirm based on my own experience. Though not tested on my younger self (too old for that), the books by Al Sweigart, especially the one about crypto, also look good if you want some math designed to be implemented on a computer.

Here is a resource I came across a few years back, Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python. When I reviewed it back then it looked pretty good as a first starting point, but I don't have first hand experience. Might want to check it out.

A book co-written by a father-son team as the son learns Python programming developing small games
http://www.manning.com/sande/

And when you're done with that, move on to slightly bigger games, still in Python
http://inventwithpython.com/

I have a relative around that age who knows a lot about the Xbox and iPad. I remember from my Commodore 64 days how these machines were not "walled gardens" and how I could start programming in BASIC as soon as I turned my Commodore 64 on. So I looked for some programming books for him.

I looked at a lot of books. I suggest cursorily flipping through the first few chapters of books you consider. It came down to two books, I don't recall what the second choice would have been. I picked Invent your own Computer Games with Python. Why? Because Python is a good tool to teach kids a language, but it is also used for real stuff out in the world, it is not a toy language like BASIC. Because kids are interested in games at that age, and with this they can program their own. And because it is basically written for kids and beginners - it is not a "learn Python" book for someone like me, who already knows C, C++, Java, PERL etc. and is just picking up one more language.

I bought a hard copy of the book, but it is also online for free on their website. He mainly uses an iPad, so I installed a free SSH client for iPad so he can ssh into an account I created on my web server and run Python. My web server had an old version of Python, so I installed a local copy of the latest Python and redid the PATH for the account to hit the local python binary first.

I'm still mulling how he can edit programs. I used nano (and vi) when I first was showing him, but might download scp for iPad and an editor for iPad, so he can scp the programs. I want to make it as easy as possible, and he can learn harder stuff later.

Aside from the book needing Python 3, which just made me have to do a little work, so far so good with the book.

Try Invent With Python: http://inventwithpython.com/

My 5 year old boy had no trouble reading Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python. I think we really underestimate very young kids' ability to understand programming and algorithms. His biggest problem was typing. I had to put that book on pause for him and introduce him to Typing Tutor for Kids.

Hi, I'm the author of "Invent with Python". I'd like to go into some more details about the book.

I wrote this book because I noticed there was a lack of "by example" programming tutorials for Python that young adults could follow along. I first learned BASIC from a book which presented the complete source code for games (think Byte magazine or those books on http://atariarchives.org/ )

It seems that most "4 kidz" programming books were focused at too high of an abstracted level (RPG Maker, game creation kits, etc.) and didn't go into actual code. I wanted something at the level of BASIC (but without BASIC's hang ups). Each chapter of the book focuses on the complete source code for a small game and explains the concepts from there. The first several chapters of the book use ASCII graphics for their games (tic tac toe, othello, hangman, etc.) and the later chapters go into graphics and sound (Pygame makes it very easy). The book skips some topics that aren't necessary for these basic programs (OOP, recursion, most of the standard library's modules, even file I/O). The book is meant to be an introduction that gets the reader creating programs as soon as possible.

What I noticed was that Python makes writing these games much easier than BASIC ever was and Python really should become the modern replacement for the niche that BASIC had. Also, Python is a real language (unlike game creation kits) and can scale up to the professional level (unlike BASIC).

Oh yeah, and if you check out the book ( http://inventwithpython.com/ ) the web version is always more up to date than the PDF version. Thanks for the traffic Slashdot!

Just stumbled upon this today. Not sure how good the book is but found it linked today on http://pygame.org/

http://inventwithpython.com/

Python is multiplatform and is free. There are quite a few free tools and libraries available. It is a 'real' language that is at the same time suitable for youngsters to learn on. With the huge Python ecosystem that exists you can have them cranking out code in a text editor, an interpreter or a full blown IDE. (A wide number of them in fact). Python also makes for a nice bridge to C as it pretty easy to integrate the two. If you feel competent, you could probably just hit the Python docs and work your way through them. If you'd like a little help and have material already prepared for teaching younger people how to program with Python, there are resources out there.
 
I recommend Hello World! which uses Python. (You can read my full review of it here.)
 
If you don't want to buy a book, then you may want to look at Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python 2nd ed. I haven't read it myself yet, and a quick glance showed it to have some rough edges, but one can't be too picky at that price. It is available to download or read online.