Looking For a Good Book

For kids?  This book is great for ANYone looking to learn what Javascript is, and how to write it.

In the vein of the “Dummies” books and “Idiot’s Guide” books come the “for Kids” books, which approach a topic, in this case writing Javascript, as if the reader has no background in it.  And in the case of many programming languages, that probably is true for most of us.

Author Nick Morgan clearly understands the subject, but best of all, he understands how to teach it!  This is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide that not only explains what certain code will do and why it’s important, but walks the reader through the process of going on-line and in-putting code and the best part is that the results can be seen immediately!

The tasks start small and simple and get more and more complex as we get further in to the book, but at all stages we can see the results immediately and the results get more fun as we go, until we are playing our own snakes game at the end.

When HTML was the language that web programmers had to know, I was fairly accomplished, and then I learned PHP, but as web languages got more complex and at the same it became easier for people to create web pages, I stopped learning the various languages.  But if there’s one language that would be good to know, for anyone interested in creating interactive programming, it would be JavaScript, and thanks to Nick Morgan, it actually feels like this is accessible!

When I see a book like this, with the cover designed as it is, and with the title “…for Kids” I tend to think of elementary school children.  Given that, I’m not entirely sure that this (or any programming language, for that matter) is something kids will do.  But I’ll admit that I’m not up on what elementary school children are learning these days.  This feels like middle school or junior high level material – still ‘kids’ to most of us, but very different learning levels.

Still…I’m not convinced this really is for kids.  I think it’s for adults like me who feel they might grasp something that’s written toward school-aged kids.  In either case…this is a very valuable resource, and fun, to boot!

Looking for a good book?  Javascript for Kids, by Nick Morgan, is a great programming guide for the beginner, with quick, obvious results.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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JavaScript for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming

author: Nick Morgan

publisher: No Starch Press

ISBN: 1593274084

paperback, 252 pages