If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
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If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
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Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#2On htdp.org: https://htdp.org/2018-01-06/Book/part_prologue.html
"If programming were just about numbers and arithmetic, it would be as boring as mathematics."
What's wrong with this author?
Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#3On htdp.org: https://htdp.org/2018-01-06/Book/part_prologue.html "If programming were just about numbers and arithmetic, it would be as boring as mathematics." What's wrong with this author?
"Just kidding: mathematics is a fascinating subject, but you won’t need much of it for now."
Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#4People who worked through HtDP: what are your impressions?
Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#5It's always interesting seeing the textbooks that are renowned by professors/people with prior knowledge, yet disliked by actual students. The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a pretty famous example (iirc, the actual course was received pretty negatively by students).
I wonder how many people have actually sat down with a bunch of students and done a real experiment with textbooks. It's quite easy to think that a textbook is good when you already understand the material. Only by getting feedback from real students can you truly figure out whether a textbook is good. It'd be interesting to do a course with two different textbooks and the exact same professor and compare feedback/results. Perhaps they could even take the same final exam. Preferably at an average university. One problem with using textbooks written by MIT professors (such as Artin, Strang, etc.) is that MIT students are far stronger than average and can generally skip certain elided steps that other students cannot.
Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#6People who worked through HtDP: what are your impressions?
I worked through it some years ago because I was interested in Racket. It is solid when it comes to programming, but if your goal is to get the Scheme feeling, the little Schemer would be a much better choice.
BTW a very nice introduction to Racket is also "Realm of Racket".
Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#7The audience that SICP was written for seems to be basically a younger, roughly freshman-year Gerry Sussman, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.
I haven't done HtDP yet. I love The Little Schemer http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/ , but I can't recommend it unequivocally, mainly because I've found (somewhat to my surprise) that it's not accessible to all programming beginners without quite a lot of extra in-person tuition. (And I'm talking about the early chapters here, not chs. 7-10 or chs. 8-10.)
Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#8I suppose it depends on what people are trying to learn. Programming and computer science are very different things.
Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#9I can fully recommend HtDP for beginning programming - tried various options for my 11 year old. I needed it to involve very little help from me - tried some scratch, mit50x, both which helped but did not spark and sustain interest.
Then we came across https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-simple-data-ubcx-htc1x - love it and does not need any help from me :) planning to move on to https://www.edx.org/course/how-code-complex-data-ubcx-htc2x after that!
edit: corrected typos
Re: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?
#10People who worked through HtDP: what are your impressions?
I liked it. My least favorite part wasn't the book itself but rather DrRacket. DrRacket's not bad, in fact it has some slick features, but I don't consider it great either. As an IDE it's good, but as a text editor it's poor. But then again my brain has been poisoned by Vim, DrRacket is probably great for young students without preexisting biases like mine.
I've been using racket for almost all of my recreational programming for the past few years but I don't do it with DrRacket.