On 8 August 2012 10:24, Hendrik Boom <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 04:22:09PM -0400, Brian van den Broek wrote:
<snip helpful details of uprading testing and aptitude> >> Sorry. I teach at Dawson. Classes start soonish. Once they do, I'll >> have less time to spend poking and tweaking. > > I figured you were a teacher rather early in the discussion. Are you > affected by the August resumption of last years classes because of the > strikes? Hi Hendrik, I was out of the country last academic year. But, as I understand it, Dawson students were on strike for a very few days. This years schedule is unaffected. >From a purely selfish standpoint, the overall situation is likely to help me. Dawson's teaching assignments are allocated by seniority; I'm low enough on the list that it is uncertain if I have teaching in the Spring. Dawson has been getting inquiries from students at CEGEPs that did have substantial strike disruption who want to know if they can transfer to Dawson's Fall term once their classes from last year are completed. That isn't feasible, but the desire suggests Dawson's enrollments will go up. > My son went through Dawson, but not in comp sci. A few weeks ago he > suddenly asked me what he should do if he wanted to learn programming. > I suggested he start with the book 'how to design programs', because > that teaches how to think about programming, using Scheme, a relatively > easy language to work with but one that's still good enough for real > applications. If nothing else that'll teach him whether programming is > really what he wants to do. And there's some evidence that if one is > learning a conventional (and in my mind obsolete) language like C you do > better if you've spent a few weeks learning Scheme first. I'm a philosopher of mathematics and logic, so, for a philosopher, pretty technically minded. I tried reading HTDP last year and found it slow and uninteresting. Depending on his background, he might have the same reaction. I got what scheme and lisp I have mostly by reading The Little Schemer and a couple of the emacs docs focused on elisp. I started the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs on that basis and found it real work but doable, and then life got in the way. I started from ill-recalled HS Basic and taught myself python tolerably well. I used an earlier edition of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. It is free as an ebook and published as dead-tree by OReilly. The edition I used was aimed at HS students; a quick read, not as slow as HTDP, but also not as underlying CS principles oriented <http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/>. I moved from that to Learning Python <http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596158071.do> though I used an earlier, much shorter, edition. That got me to the point were further reading could help some, but nowhere near so much as coding could :-) Thanks for the further advice, and I hope the above is of some use in return. Best, Brian vdB _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
