Programming for the Absolute Beginner

by Jerry Lee Ford Jr.

Want to learn computer programming but aren't sure where to start? Programming for the Absolute Beginner provides a gentle learning curve in programming for anyone who wants to develop fundamental programming skills and create computer programs. The primary focus is on teaching the reader how to program using a free implementation of BASIC called Just BASIC. As such, the book focuses on developing programs that run on Microsoft® Windows®, but also presents programming principles that apply to different environments, including other operating systems and the Internet. Additionally, the book provides a solid foundation for advancing to different programming languages as you gain confidence in your newly acquired programming abilities. As part of the for the absolute beginner series, Programming for the Absolute Beginner teaches all the concepts through the creation of simple computer games, making the learning process much more fun and enjoyable.

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 2007

Reviews

[Landis Duffett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book delivers what it promises: a hands-on immersion into the world (and way of thinking) of programming for the absolute beginner. To say it is for the absolute beginner is not to say that it is easy or fluffy (like a lot of introductions). I learned a lot from the book. Having said that, there were some oddities that one should be forewarned about with this book. For one thing, the projects in each chapter are just kind of "plopped down" in your lap. You're asked basically to copy the code into the computer and run the program. This technique obviously has its pedagogical limitations. It would be as if a German teacher had students copy pages of Goethe as a method for learning German. This used to be done, and it's not to say there are no benefits to it, but given how pedagogically rich the lead-up to these projects is, I feel that Ford could have come up with something a bit more interactive. One other thing about the projects is that they rarely (if ever?) have much to do with the central concepts just learned in the chapter. Their selection for each chapter seems mostly arbitrary (there are no loops in the project for the "Working with loops" chapter; the project for the chapter on working with text files is a tic tac toe game, e.g.). One real strength of the projects are the "challenges" at the end, in which the reader is asked to modify or enhance each application in some way. At first I was frustrated by the difficulty (as an educator, I was tempted to lodge the complaint, "there was not enough scaffolding provided for this!"), but by the second or third project I was actually gaining confidence and looking forward to these challenges. The challenges are good because the author has in fact provided enough "scaffolding," which, as any programmer knows, often comes in shamelessly copying code from some other app. Forcing the student to flip around in the book to find this particular syntax or that particular subroutine or function to accomplish this or that task was a great way to force me to think like a programmer. One huge drawback to the book, though, is that the companion website promised and touted throughout the book is not available. Instead, if you go to the cengage website you find files for the previous edition of the book and one of the projects (a big one, too - the "Breakout" video game) is missing and another one (the ask the genie game) does not have the same files, but most of the files are the same so it does provide some help. All in all, the book is a bit messy and pedagogically lopsided but if you make it through and invoke some tolerance of ambiguity, you may just fall in love with programming or, if we don't want to give this one book that much credit, at least we can say the book will have egged you on in your smittenness.

[Ng An · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides a very basic definition and function with examples. It is helpful for me to know some basic, however, limited in knowledge expansion. That is to say, the book sometime do not describe enough and was a bit hard to understand (toward the end).