Learn How to Program Using Any Web Browser

honestpuck writes "Harold Davis has started with a marvelous idea, teaching programming using a language available on all platforms, JavaScript, and an interface familiar to everyone, the web browser. Learn How to Program Using Any Web Browser is written for absolute beginners to learn the basic principles of programming -- or at least that's what the cover would have you believe." Read on for honestpuck's evaluation of that claim. Learn How to Program Using Any Web Browser author Harold Davis pages 396 publisher Apress rating 5 reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 1590591135 summary Not much programming, but well written

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.

You can purchase Learn How to Program Using Any Web Browser from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

javascript is horrible

[cft]

not only does it's syntax suck (think java), but it's full of exploits, ever heard of the site lastmeasure? jesus

when I see a web page that requires js (like orkut), I just shake my head and go elsewhere.

Truly, if there ever was a bad idea, this is it.

Re:javascript is horrible

[pi eater]

Java isn't as bad as you say.. I use it every day.

funny shirts.. geeky shirts!

why program? using VB is better

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

fp

[Anonymous Coward]

fp?

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

Way To late Dildo

GOD I HATE THIS PLACE

[Anonymous Coward]

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[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:Do I have the Asperger's syndrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes, YOU DO. It's The Geek Syndrome Autism - and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome - is surging among the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame? By Steve Silberman Nick is building a universe on his computer. He's already mapped out his first planet: an anvil-shaped world called Denthaim that is home to gnomes and gods, along with a three-gendered race known as kiman. As he tells me about his universe, Nick looks up at the ceiling, humming fragments of a melody over and over. "I'm thinking of making magic a form of quantum physics, but I haven't decided yet, actually," he explains. The music of his speech is pitched high, alternately poetic and pedantic - as if the soul of an Oxford don has been awkwardly reincarnated in the body of a chubby, rosy-cheeked boy from Silicon Valley. Nick is 11 years old. Nick's father is a software engineer, and his mother is a computer programmer. They've known that Nick was an unusual child for a long time. He's infatuated with fantasy novels, but he has a hard time reading people. Clearly bright and imaginative, he has no friends his own age. His inability to pick up on hidden agendas makes him easy prey to certain cruelties, as when some kids paid him a few dollars to wear a ridiculous outfit to school. One therapist suggested that Nick was suffering from an anxiety disorder. Another said he had a speech impediment. Then his mother read a book called Asperger's Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals. In it, psychologist Tony Attwood describes children who lack basic social and motor skills, seem unable to decode body language and sense the feelings of others, avoid eye contact, and frequently launch into monologues about narrowly defined - and often highly technical - interests. Even when very young, these children become obsessed with order, arranging their toys in a regimented fashion on the floor and flying into tantrums when their routines are disturbed. As teenagers, they're prone to getting into trouble with teachers and other figures of authority, partly because the subtle cues that define societal hierarchies are invisible to them. "I thought, 'That's Nick,'" his mother recalls. Asperger's syndrome is one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum - a milder form of the condition that afflicted Raymond Babbitt, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. In the taxonomy of autism, those with Asperger's syndrome have average - or even very high - IQs, while 70 percent of those with other autistic disorders suffer from mild to severe mental retardation. One of the estimated 450,000 people in the US living with autism, Nick is more fortunate than most. He can read, write, and speak. He'll be able to live and work on his own. Once he gets out of junior high hell, it's not hard to imagine Nick creating a niche for himself in all his exuberant strangeness. At the less fortunate end of the spectrum are what diagnosticians call "profoundly affected" children. If not forcibly engaged, these children spend their waking hours in trancelike states, staring at lights, rocking, making high-pitched squeaks, and flapping their hands, repetitively stimulating ("stimming") their miswired nervous systems. In one of the uncanny synchronicities of science, autism was first recognized on two continents nearly simultaneously. In 1943, a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner published a monograph outlining a curious set of behaviors he noticed in 11 children at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. A year later, a pediatrician in Vienna named Hans Asperger, who had never seen Kanner's work, published a paper describing four children who shared many of the same traits. Both Kanner and Asperger gave the condition the same name: autism - from the Greek word for self, autos - because the children in their care seemed to withdraw into iron-walled universes of their own. Kanner went on to launch the field of child psychiatry in the US, while Asperger's clinic was destroyed by a shower of Allied bombs. Over the next 40 years, Kanner became wide

Re:I JUST STROKED MY PENIS UNTIL I EJACULATED!

[Master of Transhuman]

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Re:I JUST STROKED MY PENIS UNTIL I EJACULATED!

[Anonymous Coward]

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