on Jan 12th, 2007Programming Books for Children?
I recently received an e-mail from someone who requested that I add a “Books for Young Programmers” category to ProgrammingBooks.org. I thought it was an awesome idea and created it. I then tried to think of some programming books catered for kids, and I couldn’t think of any. When I first started programming at age 9, I learned mostly through language reference manuals that came with my Commodore 64, but it was a difficult and time consuming task, and I would have benefited greatly from a book written for someone my age.
I then started to google and search Amazon for kids books, and I didn’t have much luck. I found some really old(late 70s, early 80s) BASIC books written for kids, but nothing relatively current. Does anyone know of good programming books written for kids? If you do, please rank them!
Orthogonal to the categories that you show, you could have a category for books that are available online for free, such as Practical Common Lisp.
Ricky,
I am actually planning on adding the ability for users to add external links with descriptions, which would allow users to add links to free versions of the books(if available and legal)
Starting Forth should do. Free online version available here: http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/sf.html
When I was a kid, I read some robot-themed book that taught programming in basic. I can’t find it now, though.
Actually, I think it used “goto” quite a bit. Maybe it wasn’t so good.
This is what you seek: http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/llk/scratch/
A smalltalk like language, but picture-based instead of text based.
Here is one - an environment based on Sequeak.
http://smallwiki.unibe.ch/botsinc/
Here is one:
http://www.amazon.de/PHP-MySQL-Kids-Johann-Christian-Hanke/dp/3826616375/sr=8-1/qid=1170088748/ref=pd_ka_1/302-7293375-7045655?ie=UTF8&s=books
“PHP and MySQL for kids”
German though …
Try this one - at least designed for beginners (and mentions kids in their promo video) - plus it uses Ruby!
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_ltp/index.html
Also, it’s not a book, but “c-robots” is a great tool for teaching kids to program. It’s a stripped down C language that lets you build robots and watch them compete - you’ll have to slow your system down to get the robots to interact at a reasonable speed but it’s great fun for kids.