No Starch Press Python For Kids

En varias ocasiones he intentado aprender Python. Hay manuales más y menos extensos. Creo que es una mala idea estudiarse un manual de referencia. Creo que la mejor manera de aprender un lenguaje de programación es retando al lector a probar y a crear sus propios programas, y creo que este libro lo consigue. De una manera más o menos rápida, con no tanto esfuerzo como se pudiera pensar, el libro va guiando al lector al aprendizaje de Python. Uno de sus puntos fuertes es sin duda que al terminar un capítulo, siempre quedan ganas de continuar leyendo. Si bien puede parecer que el hecho de que sea para niños cause cierto rechazo, lo cierto es que el lenguaje con el que está escrito atrae a niños y a adultos. Que la palabra "niños" no eche para atrás a nadie que quiera aprender Python. Quizá no me convierta en un gurú de Python, desde luego, pero es un gran punto de inicio. Y como se suele decir, un gran viaje comienza con un pequeño paso.

great book easy to follow

This Fall, I plan to teach an after-school Python course at our local public school to 4th and 5th graders and I have selected "Python for Kids" to form the content. I had looked at a few books on teaching kids programming and on learning python and Jason Briggs' book stands out for several reasons. It makes programming and Python in particular accessible to kids with no experience with either. One of the great challenges in teaching kids is shedding assumptions about language, knowledge, perspective etc. that adults take for granted. Jason does this very well without talking down or dumbing down. I also found the book to be paced well with a balance of challenge (concepts and coding tasks) and support (explanations and help). When new terms or programming concepts arise, Jason makes sure to introduce them so nothing goes over your head. The first 12 chapters are a basic introduction to the language and to programming concepts and the last 6 take the reader through two programming tasks of increasing difficulty. The first task is the creation of a "Bounce!" game - it takes 2 chapters (21 pages) to teach and about 100 lines of code. It is a primitive "breakout/pong" style game and really a fair amount of payoff for the effort the budding programmer must put in. The second program is called "Mr. Stick Man Races for the Exit" and is a bit more advanced/involved. It takes 4 chapters (62 pages) to cover and about 260 lines. It has more complexity but most challenging thing is that for a lot of the code, you can not run it to check your work as you go. I had a bug in my code that took me a bit of effort to find before I got it working perfectly. However, Jason has a companion web site with all code snippets in the book including these last two projects and the code example he provided there helped my find the error I had made. I am very grateful to Jason for writing the book I was looking for.

Its a simple language for kids, easy to understand by kids with great illustrations !!

Very good book. I used it to teach my kids Python programming. They learned quickly.