Many years ago there was a book (actually a mini-series) called "Programming for Poets" that taught fundamental programming to right-brain types, avoiding math almost completely and focusing a great deal on string processing. This was well before the days of the GUI or graphical IDE. I have obtained the rights to revise that book for the Rev audience but, frankly, the response to my book and other offerings so far has been disappointingly small, so I haven't had the incentive to go do that.
But adapting popular and usable texts to use Rev would be a potentially fruitful ground to explore if the market were big enough, I suspect.
Dan
On Jul 8, 2004, at 12:05 PM, Jim Hurley wrote:
It is with some hesitation that I offer this in connection with this discussion of books and documentation.
Some years ago I wrote a small book: "LOGO Physics", Holt, Reinhardt and Winston
It was intended to provide a workbook for students of LOGO, to advance their LOGO skills and allow them to learn a little physics on the side. Once they tire of drawing polygons, perhaps they would like to draw a planetary orbit based on Newton's laws of motion.
Later, after I had discovered HC, I translated the book into HyperTalk, which I felt was much better suited to beginning students. LOGO was a LISP derivative, and, while list processing is well suited to artificial intelligence, it is not the best language for beginning students.
I have made a few minor changes to make it more suitable to RunRev, and put a copy of this MS Word file on my web site:
http://home.infostations.net/jhurley/
(Look for "Programming") Caveat: It has not been class tested or even proof read.
This is not a challenge to Dan's book, or any book intended to teach the fundamentals of programming. It is intended to be used in an Advanced Placement course in High School for science students--a course which doesn't exist. It is not appropriate for students interested in Computer Science. It is the kind of programming that scientists use, i.e. light on theory, heavy on whatever-works.
I do think the use of Turtle Graphics would be a useful addendum to a high school programming course. The student gets instant gratification in graphic format, and offers a change of pace to text processing.
I believe there may be a Turtle Graphics tutorial in the works at RunRev.
Jim
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