[malandrew]

Is AP Computer Science any good? When I took it, it sucked horribly. That was when it was Pascal-based. The following year they moved to C++, which I heard was an unmitigated disaster. IIRC Allen Downey, a guy known for his great CS textbooks, was so fed up with the clusterfuck that was the AP Computer Science curriculum, that he wrote his own textbook for the intro course the taught and he based it on Python.

Either Scheme or Python should be the basis of an AP CompSci course.

Check out How to Design Programs version 2. The authors of that book have spent more time on the problem of pedagogy in computer science than anyone else I know. They've really thought the whole thing through very well.

[lumberjack]

But Pascal was awesome! CRT and GRAPH libraries were super easy to use and the syntax is so clear and easy to understand (or perhaps that was just the impression given by the small resolution of Turbo Pascal on modern high resolution screens).