[berryworm]

I can't find the PDF of the starter book, although they say in the announcement it should be available. (Edit: found it https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/beginners-guide-4th-ed )

I learned programming from the handbook of my ZX Spectrum. If the Pi would come with a similar book it would be fantastic.

Maybe there are other books that fill that niche for the Pi?

In general I find it very hard to get my kids coding (especially as their English isn't good yet, and many languages don't have German documentation). There are some fancy books, but it turns out there are a lot of details in coding that most books can't cover.

[cbozeman]

I'm about to take up the journey of learning a programming language.

What books would you recommend? What are the names of these "fancy books" you mention? And lastly, do you think there are websites that teach programming languages better than books, such as DataCamp, CodeCademy, SoloLearn, etc.?

What would be your recommendations?

[berryworm]

I bought this book for my son (elementary school), but it is in German: "Programmieren mit Python® - supereasy".

I would have preferred JavaScript, but had not immediately found a kid friendly book I liked (in German).

As for recommendations, the Pi Getting Started Book does have chapters about Python and Scratch, maybe it is a good start (see free download link).

I still like good books to learn a programming language. Also, good online documentation in a language is important imo. I still like the original Java tutorial from Sun/Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/

I know a teenager who has taught himself Java development from YouTube videos, which YouTube suggested to him.

I think it is important to have a project and be dedicated to solve it. What is it you want to do?

To give an example of an early issue we encountered: I wanted to write a simple program with my son, that asks for your date of birth and computes the number of days since your birth. But dates were not a subject of our python games programming book, so we had to read the online API documentation to figure out how to parse dates and compute time differences. Not too hard, but I think it requires dedication.

In a similar way, I think books or tutorials can never cover all sorts of issues one might encounter, so a lot of patience and dedication is needed to eventually master the coding.

For kids, I liked Micro:Bit, and if you are German, I would recommend the "Jugendwettbewerb Informatik" and accompanying tutorials.