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by trcollinson
4192 days ago
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My son, who is a little younger than your brother, wanted to learn to code and I tried a number of things but they didn't really stick. He kept "wanting to" but never really learned past regurgitating the tutorial. Finally, he picked up my TI NSpire CX CAS and started playing with it. For us really old guys it's like the next, next, next gem TI 82 graphing calculator. The TI has always included a programming language and interpreter in their calculators. It used to be "TI Basic" but now it is full Lua. They have hundreds of example programs to look and and learn from and tutorials galore. The thing that finally made it click for him was, he could take this little handheld machine anywhere and whenever a programming thought struck him he could try it. Soon he was building reusable functions and libraries of reusable functions and everything clicked. Now he's transferring a lot of that knowledge to other languages, most recently Python, without any trouble at all. I would recommend it to anyone with a kid who is interested in learning. |
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I found C for Dummies at my uncle's house and got lucky. I loved it.
I've always wondered what alternatives there are. Most of the college textbooks I had were too dense to get into, but I think I remember the Deitel and Deitel ones were descriptive enough, but kind of dry.
Maybe I'll keep this TI NSpire CX CAS in mind next time the question comes up.
About 1.5 years ago someone posted this discussion of a related article on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6303654