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Thanks for posting this and your experience. I had HTDP on my to-learn list and the parent comment somehow put a damper on it. The space-invaders project soun

• zadberry 4y ago
  Worth mentioning that there is a Space Invaders project included in the first section of HtDP. Personally, I wouldn't give Morazan's Animated Problem Solving a big recommend for someone trying to self-teach CS1, especially not when HtDP and How to Code are free. In my opinion, APS is a bit over-stuffed (it has a tendency to throw relatively advanced terms, like property-based testing, at the beginning student without much context or follow-through) and it can sometimes make exercises (including the Aliens Attack ones) overly complex and tedious. I don't think HtDP is without criticism, but if you can get through the somewhat slow-going first section, it's a great textbook. Alternatively, you can work through UBC's How to Code (H2C), which has a brisker pace. I found the first section of HtDP a bit tough-going myself, so I ended up working through H2C first. I only came back to HtDP because I found some of H2C's explanations of later material shallow, but more importantly, I felt that its exercises were generally lacking in challenge. Nonetheless, I can't recommend H2C enough. Gregor is a friendly, patient teacher, and the H2C presentation of the design recipe somehow seems more fine-grained than HtDP's version but without feeling overly complicated. Note that you can actually access the edX version of H2C for UBC students at the CS110 course page [0], just click on the link to enroll in the "edX Edge course". It appears to be an updated version of the original MOOC course with some small additions. [0] https://cs110.students.cs.ubc.ca/ https://cs110.students.cs.ubc.ca/