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Programming Books for Non-Programmers?

Posted by Cliff on from the F-Ms-you-really-should-R dept.

andy@petdance.com asks: "Any programmer who's used an online programming resource or community has had the frustration of answering programming questions for non-programmers. This is especially true with web-centric technologies like Perl and PHP. I've always wondered where to point these newest of the new, and O'Reilly's latest Ask Tim article addresses this. Unfortunately, Tim suggests picking up an ORA book on ActionScript, which seems a bit too specific. Are there any good introductions to the concepts of programming? And is any such book necessarily tied to a language?"

2 of 11 comments (clear)

  1. TAOCP? Nah by MrBlack · · Score: 3, Informative

    Although I haven't read it, I've heard this book on python (Learn to Program Using Python) is useful. It is an expanded version of this web tutorial. Although it's hard to see things from a newbie perspecitve when you've been programming for a while, python does have a reputation for being easy to learn. The syntax is nice and clean, not too verbose, and the language is coherent and well designed. And the best thing is you don't have to throw it away when you graduate from newbiehood. Save the Knuths for later on in their programming journey.

    1. Re:TAOCP? Nah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I have to seriously question the idea of using scheme to teach programming to somebody who wants to throw some PHP into their webpage. Scheme may be a great language for teaching things to CS majors, but the language structure is quite a bit different than the languages they plan on working with. We're not talking about 1st year CS students who need a solid grounding in theory, but Joe Sixpack who would like to have a little practical knowledge of coding.