Re: a php book

Geoff Berrow <blthecat@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
It's not easy. The basic concepts of programming are hard for beginners
to grasp and the learning curve is very steep.

If there is a way of dumbing it down to the point where it becomes easy
I'd dearly love to know what it is. And so would my A level students.

At the age of seven (no typo) I was taught a little bit of Logo at
school. We got as far as defining functions, including calling
functions from functions, in a few days of teaching time.

Advantages of Logo:
- reasonably clear imperative syntax
- instant feedback
- draws pretty pictures
- no messing around with memory management, IO, library dependencies,
compilers, security issues, etc.

Disadvantages:
- no practical application
- does involve a bit of learning of new syntax when switching languages

Then you hopefully have learnt enough about basic control structures,
functions (and why they are useful), and so on to go onto more
powerful languages with the basic concepts solidly learnt.

I'm told Python shares a lot of the advantages as a teaching language
while also being powerful enough to be used for serious applications,
though I've never used it myself.

--
Chris
.

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