Eric Freeman

Head First Learn To Code is a book by Eric Freeman that attempts to teach you how to write programs in Python, specifically Python 3.6. It is one of those books that has you participate in exercises and write in the book itself. This is something that I am even more leery of doing than usual since it is a library book.

Coding and Programming take an effort to do. You aren’t just going to pick up a book and be a programming wizard overnight. However, this book can help you along your way by providing you with techniques and methods to keep the information in your memory.

With that goal in mind, the book is quite entertaining. It has plenty of little pictures and images to aid memory and to keep the material fresh. The brain craves new information, this is directly from our days on the Savannah of Africa. People that didn’t see the predator didn’t live very long. However, now we live in a position that affords us the top rank of the food chain.

The book treats programs as a recipe that tells the computer what to do. This is a pertinent comparison. As many programmers and others have said; Garbage in, Garbage out. You might have heard this rule before, but it is appropriate for computers in particular. Computers aren’t magical machines, they follow set patterns and ironclad rules. All they do is compare and add numbers really fast.

Anyway, off the soapbox I go. If you want to learn the basics of programming, this book is a great place to start. It promotes involvement in the coding process and has a number of projects to take part in culminating in programming a game. It would probably be way better if I had more time with this book, but my library only has a take-out period of three weeks. Now, a little caveat. If you are a skilled programmer or know a great deal already, this book probably isn’t for you. It breaks down everything and this might be annoying if you are really familiar with coding and programming.… (mais)

At first, I was a bit annoyed with the cutesy presentation (overuse of photos of cool people with thinking captions above their heads, the “There Are No Dumb Questions” section, etc.). However, after two or three chapters, I appreciated how clear and easy to understand the authors made this dry and tedious subject. I read this for a course where basic HTML knowledge was assumed, so our main focus was on CSS and XHTML. The online extras (links are found in the book) are invaluable! This is an excellent resource and I highly recommend it.… (mais)