* Brandon LaRocque <larocque.bran...@gmail.com> [2010-08-13 18:20:17 -0400]: > My son is interested in computer programming, and given the way that > programming is being taught, I don't think it's the right way to go > about learning.What would you guys here suggest for a self-learning > curriculum that I could set up for him? By this, I mean languages, > ideas, projects. I would really appreciate any help in the matter.
i pondered about how to learn programming myself and started collecting links to answer it http://port70.net/~nsz/00_prog.html looking back now it seems like a random collection of things i think the hard part of preparing useful course material is to provide interesting and motivating problems with increasing difficulty and challenges (which depends on personal taste and changes over time, playing with qbasic used to be exciting but i would not go back there now) sicp used to be the basic book for teaching programming as well as the k&r book for teaching c, however i'm not sure how much do these motivate children nowadays (these books still give a good understanding of a programming language and the ways to build abstractions in relatively few pages) the software stack got so many layers over time that the good old low level introductions do not give a clear insight into current systems (web, 3d, etc) which are probably the most interesting topics right now the advice that kernighan gives is No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code, and rewrite it, and see it used, and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well.