"Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it." - MIT Technology Review

heliotrop · 2012-05-23T05:57:07.656159+00:00

Yeah! If you don't love Facebook, why don't you move to Russia!?

heliotrop · 2012-05-23T05:54:55.668718+00:00

Well, yes. Hell, if you think about it, even the fact that I don't log into Facebook that often or post things to it is a piece of personal information they have about me.

wildGRUB123 · 2012-05-23T05:51:36.294816+00:00

If you already know a little Python programming, take a look at the source code to the programs in this book, and then try to make your own derivitives: http://inventwithpython.com

boop-boop-a-doop · 2012-05-23T05:48:23.898797+00:00

"One of the easiest ways to create something that white people will like is to create something that will allow them to feel smart but doesn’t require a large amount of work, time, or effort."

Kind of like the Stuff White People Like website?

funkless_eck · 2012-05-22T18:44:49.033896+00:00

I wrote a book for complete beginners learning Python. It's well reviewed (48 out of 52 Amazon reviews are 5-stars) and the PDF/html versions are free to download: Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

If you at least skim through that book and want to continue making graphical games, you should know enough to read the next book Making Games with Python & Pygame (also free).

Ryanc115 · 2012-05-22T15:55:36.211858+00:00

Learn Python the Hard Way seems well-liked, but I prefer Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python (but that's probably because the author is a handsome, wise Redditor who answers programming questions you send him via email. al@inventwithpython.com )

(And because the author is me.)

Syntaximus · 2012-05-22T15:52:08.873855+00:00

BASIC's not dead, it just deserves to die.

I've written a couple of well-reviewed, Creative Commons-licensed books that teach programming to complete beginners. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach programming to newbies. BASIC needs a hero's funeral, and then be burned on a pyre and forgotten.

I wrote a blog post about it: Just Let BASIC Die

BASIC is not a simple programming language, it was just far simpler than any of the other languages in its time. Modern languages like Python and Ruby are much easier to learn and (more importantly) have large communities and documentation. The fact that BASIC keeps getting revived by tiny, mostly unsupported variants (none of which are compatible with each other) only prolongs the confusion of new programmers.

GingerKing96 · 1 day

Here's a book written for beginner programmers in Python. It's well reviewed on Amazon and you can download the full PDF for free. "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" http://inventwithpython.com

funkless_eck · 1 day

I cannot recommend strongly enough that you ditch BASIC and move on to a modern language (especially Python).

BASIC was an excellent place to start for complete beginners two decades ago. They are not simple programming languages, they were just simpler than the other languages at that time. Python and Ruby are much better languages to use to learn programming.

More importantly, you will be able to find documentation and resources for modern languages. You won't be able to find nearly as many people who can help you with obscure details of BASIC on these old platforms.

funkless_eck · 1 day

http://atariarchives.org/ has scans of several old Atari BASIC books.

TheSpaceOfAdes · 2 days

TL;DR:

http://inventwithpython.com

This the web page for the book "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python". The book is aimed at total beginners, is free to download, and rated very well on Amazon.

Herp_in_my_Derp · 2 days

If you don't mind learning a new language (which I recommend, because C++ can be a bit much as a first language), I'd recommend this site:

http://inventwithpython.com

This the web page for the book "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python". The book is aimed at total beginners, is free to download, and rated very well on Amazon.

Ineedsathelp · 2 days

I wrote several game programs that were designed to be 1) easy to read and understood by beginners and 2) have their programming concepts explained as well. The code is on this site http://inventwithpython.com (which also has the PDFs of the books free to download.)

Looking back, when I first learned how to program, I realized that most of my programs were just derivatives of programs I had seen before. So I wanted to make a large collection of different types of games ('cause games are fun) so that people could see them and then get ideas for their own programs.

amonkeyscousin · 2 days

http://inventwithpython.com

This the web page for the book "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python". The book is aimed at total beginners, is free to download, and rated very well on Amazon.

EdgarAllenBro_ · 2 days

http://inventwithpython.com

This the web page for the book "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python". The book is aimed at total beginners, is free to download, and rated very well on Amazon.

zabzonk · 3 days

I wrote my own response to Jeff's piece: A Modest Proposal: Please Don’t Learn to Code Because It Will Damage Your Tiny Brain

TL; DR: Remember, Jeff isn’t just saying that most professions and lifestyles wouldn’t be significantly enhanced by programming ability. He isn’t just saying that “coding is the new literacy that you have to have” is hyperbole. (Both are arguable points.) If he was, he would have titled his post, “You Don’t Actually Need to Learn to Code”. Rather, he wants to keep the unwashed masses from embarrassing themselves with their amateur code which he and the other elite coders will end up having to debug. That’s why the title is “Please Don’t Learn to Code”.

It’s his plea for you to not even try.

timelighter · 3 days

Scratch is by far the best resource I've seen for that age group. If they are willing to sit through some boring typing and not getting that immediate graphical feedback (but would want to learn "real" programming), I wrote a free book for complete beginners as young as 10 or 12 for Python:

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

badtim · 4 days

In that case, totally skip Scratch. Scratch is absolutely wonderful, but I use it as a stepping stone because it has immediate graphical results and also sidesteps the problem of typing (which can be a frustrating hurdle for kids).

If you want to teach her "real" programming, Python is the best language for total beginners. I wrote a book aimed to be readable by 10 year old-ish kids that you can read for free online: Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

hahnsolocup · 4 days

I would go with Python; as a first language there's nothing better for beginners.

I wrote a (free) book called "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" that is for beginners. You can read it online at http://inventwithpython.com

cptjmshook · 5 days

Reddit is extremely reactionary. everything is an emergency, crisis and the outrage machine goes full blast.

So, reddit is pretty much like a 14 year old girl?

No, reddit is pretty much like Fox News.

UNLEASH THE DOWNVOTES.

kracekumar · 6 days

Nobody recommends the 3,168 pages of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming as a first step for people who want to learn programming.

If you're going to learn how to plumb a house, learning how a toilet works is a good first step. If you're going to learn how to maintain JavaScript for a website, playing around with Logo is a good first step.

kracekumar · 6 days

Even if Mr. Bloomberg did "learn to code", with apologies to Adam Vandenberg, I expect we'd end up with this: 10 PRINT "I AM MAYOR" 20 GOTO 10

Ha ha, silly mayor. Thinks he has the smarts to learn to code. He'll just embarrass himself with his toy spaghetti code.

Jeff is right to use the sarcastic quotes. The very idea of the mayor of New York being able to write small scripts to automate some simple tasks on his computer is absurd!

tompa_coder · 6 days

If you think having a hiring problem is unique in this business

Copy and paste the text where I said or even implied that hiring problems are unique to the software industry.

It sounds like the situation was, there's a lot of crap devs out there and the dev that was hired turned out to be crap.

But if there weren't a lot of crap devs out there and just the good devs, it sounds like the position would have gone unfilled. If you could have hired a good dev, then the good dev would have been hired regardless of how many other crap devs are there.

So the fact that someone was hired over nobody being hired means that the company thought even a crap dev was better than no dev. Nobody was forcing the company to hire someone. If the company hired someone who ended up being more trouble than nobody filling the position, the mistake was in hiring that person. Not hiring someone isn't the optimal option, but it sounds like it was a better option than hiring the crap dev.

(Also, to be fair, replace "crap" with "inexperienced". Everyone sucks at first.)

tompa_coder · 6 days

I have worked with far too many people who got into it because its a good job and utterly fucking suck at it. Worse, they fuck shit up beyond repair.

Sounds more like a hiring-decision problem rather than a programming-skills problem.

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