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Learn How to Program Using Any Web Browser
The language is suitably light and simple, the book well-structured and broken down into easily digested chunks. The order in which concepts are introduced is fairly traditional for a language tutorial: first we get types, variables and statements, before moving on to conditionals, loops, and functions, followed by arrays and objects before finishing with event-driven programming. Davis' decision to leave string handling till last seems a little perverse and personally I would have introduced functions earlier.
My real complaints about this book centre on the abstract nature of the discussion. There are very few real world examples that could be useful to anyone. The best you get is a version of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" in Chapter 3, and an 'auction' application. The book would have been improved dramatically if the end result of your study was a few things you could actually point to.
I also have a complaint about the target audience for this book. The web page for the book at the publishers states that "The target reader is likely a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, who is just starting to get curious about what makes a computer work -- or an office worker who has been using computer applications for years, and would like to spend some time delving deeper into what makes them tick." Most adults and even teenagers don't want to 'learn how to program' as much as they want to learn how to use a tool to perform a task. If your tool is JavaScript, then it's almost certain your task is related to building web pages, but this gets little real attention from Davis. For even younger students, this book totally lacks anything to hold their attention -- the lack of real-world examples hurts here.
I also take issue with the title: this book doesn't really teach 'programming' much at all. It certainly teaches you to write JavaScript, but where are the sections about the real lessons of programming, such as top-down vs. bottom-up design, or breaking a task up into chunks? Even debugging has little coverage -- a single thirty-page chapter, half of which is specific to JavaScript or the throwing and handling of exceptions. Since the work of Papert and others at MIT twenty-five years ago, we've learned a great deal about how to teach programming concepts in a simple manner, but Davis appears to have ignored all this and given us a language tutorial. The publisher's web page for the book says "very emphatically, this is not a book about programming JavaScript." If that's so then I'd argue that it isn't a book about learning the principles of programming either.
It is obvious from this book that Davis is an excellent writer; if he had tried to write a book to teach JavaScript and had focused on the tasks for which it is often used this, volume may have been superb. As it is, he has shot for a higher goal and fallen far too short.
If you would like to check it out for yourself, you can go to the web page for the book where there is sample chapter, the Table of Contents (though they call it a "Detailed TOC" as distinct from the 'Table of Contents,' which is just a list of 11 chapter titles) and index, all in PDF format.
I went looking for a book that I could give to my 11-year-old daughter now that she has become interested in "what Daddy does." I'm still looking, I'm certain that this one isn't it.
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The last thing the world needs right now is more programmers. Teach them some other trade which won't be killed by cheap global labor.
I think the reviewer's premise that 12-13 year old wants to learn programming for a specific task is bull. I think what the book is trying to speak to is how I learned to program: BASIC. I wasn't trying to DO anything specific it was just a good way to start playing around because it came free w/ the computer and you could make it beep or say hi or whatever. I think that posing javascript as a replacement (now that basic does not come packaged with the OS) is a GREAT idea. It's free, there is a developing environment built right in (well with mozilla at least) and it's actually fairly powerful while still beaing easy to learn.
I've done a fair bit of Javascript programming, I think it's an okay language. It certainly could be worse. But here are some random issues that I think may make it difficult for beginners to pick up:
1) No print() or echo() function. If you want to write something to the equivilent of stdout, you need to use document.write(). And if you use alert() as you're debugging something, you'll quickly get tired of boxes that pop up, I know I have.
2) Weird OOP syntax. If you want to create class foo, you first create function foo, then to create a method you go and create function foo.prototype.bar(). I think that's needlessly complicated. It also leaves the beginner open for a shock when they start studing OOP syntax of other languages, where a class is defined and its functions are actually defined INSIDE the class.
3) No file/database support. Good luck trying to interact with a file or database from Javascript. As the user learns more about programming, they're going to want to use these sorts of things. Javascript just wasn't designed for that.
Those are the biggest things off the top of my head on why I believe Javascript is not an ideal choice for beginners. (I don't claim to be a JS god, so if I'm wrong about any of the above, someone please correct me...)
As a sort of corrolary to this...you need to have something that you're trying to *do*. You really can't open up a reference book and just start to code, you really need a reason to do it. It's sort of like asking someone you know who can speak another language to "say something in German" or whatnot: they're left floundering. If, on the other hand, you ask them to "count to 10 in German" then it's a different story.
Any new language or software engineering concept I've learned that has been from a book has only been because I had to learn the language for the task at hand or it's been brought to my attention that a particular design pattern (or what have you) may be appropriate. I personally can't just pick up a book on programming with a cup of coffee if I don't have a real reason to.
Just some thoughts.
"Has anything you've done made your life better?" - American History X
No seriously.
It's easy, it's pretty, you get a grasp of functions and objects and you can do moderatly complex things pretty quickly which means that they'll get instant gratification.
If you want to introduce them to programming, given them something that can make them go "wow!" pretty quickly. Thats what made those Spectrum BASIC books so good - within 10 minutes you had lots of pretty squares up on the screen.
I'm sure a lot of people would shudder at the though and want their kids to start with C++ or Perl - but I think that it might do more damage than good. No one wants to be scared off by pointers or regular expressions.
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I keep seeing those "Fighter Maker" and "RPG Maker" PS2 games on the shelves. Seems like that would be the thing to give a 12 or 13 year old to get them interested in programming and maybe learn some of it's basics.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
I highly recommend "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python." It's a great introduction to programming using a language that doesn't get in the way. Python is also a great language for starting procedurally and "graduating" to OO. Besides being a great book, it's available for free in LaTeX, PDF, PostScript, and HTML. Needless to say, both the language and the book are available "using any web browser." As for JavaScript, I have tried to keep it at arm's length for as long as possible.
desire is not the issue. If you know how easy it is to run people over, you would realize that by teaching driving to anyone even vaguely interested in it, we are harming our own community. Driving is a dangerous skill and should only be used by people mature enough to use it responsibly. The best way to make sure they are mature enough is to make learning hard enough that all of those irresponsible drivers will run off to download pr0n instead of learning to drive.
:)
I could go on... but I think my point is clear
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
They already do this with driving, or at least they try to. It doesn't work, apparantly, if you take a look at traffic.
Grandparent has it wrong, of course. Even if the clueless teenagers don't know how to program, there will always be competent programmers developing tools to create malicious software for them, as there has been from the beginning. And these script kiddies will gobble it up like a badly written VisualBasic virus.
that it is free and the license built into the browser allows for development work. There aren't an awful lot of other programming languages/development that can boast this.
Having Javascript already available in the browsers is an advantage because a very great majority of computer tech teachers that I have met have troubles with even understanding the concept of directories and paths, let alone have a snowball's chance in hell of installing something like gcc under Cygwin.
Going off on a personal rant, I would like to see teachers be a lot more scrupulous with respect to licensing software. How seriously is a kid going to take the classroom instruction on not sharing other people's IP when the teacher tells them to download VB, QBASIC or some other clearly copywritten tool into their PCs?
As an added bonus, Javascript is not terrible to program in and you can come up with some good simple client side games. How about Pong, Tic-Tac-Toe, Minefield, Battleship, etc.?
I think that using Javascript for teaching programming is a step in the right direction, but it sounds like this book could have done a better job in making it compelling for kids.
myke
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