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What I hate about “beginner” programming books

113 points by jsnk 15y ago

pook 15y ago
Point #2 is the Little Coder's problem _Why spoke of: a beginning programmer is likely to be discouraged by the vast difference between the toy programs displayed in introductory books, and the real code that inspired them. I think any purported attempt to teach programming which does not end with the student creating a non-trivial, cool app, is a shame. What went wrong between SICP and current (non-Hartl/Shaw) beginning texts?
tolmasky 15y ago
I'm no expert, but I think it's possible that the fact that's a book at all may be a failing. The goal is to get them writing code and seeing results, as well as mimicking their later real world experience of experimenting to find the right answer. That's why I think things like code academy better reflect the way we'll be teaching this in the future.
- evincarofautumn 15y ago
  I’m not sure I agree. Sure, programming is a craft, and the only way to learn it is to do it. But I see no reason why a book can’t serve as an introduction, giving the reader projects to complete and guidance toward completing them. Being that they lack interactivity and mentorship, sure, books are difficult to make into what beginners need. But just because they’re not the best medium doesn’t mean they should be completely discounted.
  - tolmasky 15y ago
    Let me begin by saying that I don't think books aren't the right approach for every programmer - simply true beginners. In my experience beginner programmers get stuck very quickly on very small and frustrating bugs, such as not understanding how to put together the syntax. If they can't overcome this quickly, you may completely lose them. This is where the book completely fails as it can provide no further assistance. Even if the answer is provided in the printed text, the individual may not "see" the difference between what they've typed and what the book has printed (it may take a while to get used to the computer-level of exactness you need when comparing code, and to overcome some punctuation blindness they may have developed from normal reading, etc.). Similarly, I believe it is bad to read too much before doing anything, because as you read you believe you are following along: "uh huh, that makes sense, sure, got it...", then a whole chapter in you may actually start coding and notice you don't really know what's going on (or again, simply think you don't due to some simple syntax mistake). Now the individual will feel overwhelmed as they have an entire chapter's worth of material that they may or may not understand. Even if there are exercises in the middle, people often say "oh thats easy and makes sense" and skip it since its a "waste of time" (which is bad, because its very easy to think you understand something when they don't). Having seen a few people use codeacademy, I now believe that it may need to be taken a step further: I think for the first few exercises the code should actually be ghosted so that the user is literally "tracing" over it (as opposed to the current technique of saying "now type this in the console"). For example, as I described in a previous comment, one person got completely stuck because it said "Now type variable.length.". The user didn't notice that the last period wasn't part of the code and unfortunately the error isn't very beginner-friendly: "Expected an identifier but found '}' instead" -- "what, I didn't type a }? And what's an identifier?". I believe ghosting the text and beeping when you type a character that doesn't match can give you a feel for the code -- its kind of how rewriting notes really helps it sink in vs. just reading them. Then, slowly take the training wheels off.
    - Hyena 15y ago
      You are basically describing the LXTHW model.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Apocryphon 15y ago
#1 is a great point and a great recommend. There is certainly a place for long, ponderous reference book-like tomes, but they are a poor substitute for concise beginner books. Eloquent JavaScript is amazing in that respect.
- GlennS 15y ago
  I think the right approach would be to print the concise beginner book and bind it with 1000 blank pages. That way it won't be too daunting for the learner, but can still perform well in a secondary role as a monitor stand once they're done with it. More seriously, I think that the discipline of making a shorter book usually produces better writing. If you're going to write something longer than say 300 pages (about 1 K&R-length) you'd better have a lot of interesting things to say.
  - Someone 15y ago
    I agree ('the internet' thinks this idea is from Pascal: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.") Problem is that that short book, having taken more effort to write, would have to be more expensive (paper, printing, distribution, etc. cost 'nothing' for any book worth anything at all). Selling a shorter book for more money is possible, but customers typically prefer the longer book ("more is better, and even if it is not, I just don't read the extra stuff")
    - LewisCr 15y ago
      I thought loisirs were rentals?
    - aridiculous 15y ago
      Which is why you have to find the cracks in the inefficient market. Thank god for passionate individuals not driven primarily by money.
zdw 15y ago
The "worthless example to explain features" in my pet peeve... This is something like "we're going to have a class named Vehicle" and "class Car inherits Vehicle" in an OO language. You would almost never use something like this in a real program, and it takes what's a minor and problem fraught feature (inheritance) and quickly has new programmers creating bizzaro hierarchies that never should be.
- turkeygizzard 15y ago
  Forgive me, but I'm really new to programming, and I don't really understand why your example is something that shouldn't be used in real programming. Should a Car be a Vehicle object instead of a sub-class?
  - driax 15y ago
    The problem lies in that you never have a "Car" which should inherit "Vehicle". It's a question that never comes up in programming. The bad part of it, is that it sometimes makes new programmers look for these kind of concepts in their code, and write class-based code around them. Exactly the problem http://pyvideo.org/video/880/stop-writing-classes http://pyvideo.org/video/880/stop-writing-classes discusses. Basicly it teaches people to think in taxonomies, which is not good for object-oriented programming since it usually results in highly complicated code, with way to many classes and inheritance. Inheritance is mostly good for factoring out common code between different sub-classes. Or extending library classes in a way that wasn't thought of when they were written.
    - zdw 15y ago
      Ditto on this. It's an abuse of the concept of inheritance, which teaches the wrong reasons to use the concept.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - nikcub 15y ago
      I don't think I have ever read a programming book that teaches OO in the same way that most developers use it - that is implement top level first and then when you have commonalities between objects abstract them out into parent objects. Thinking about and mapping out class hierarchies is something that Java enterprise analysts do. A good example to teach OO would be a config parser. Write a config parsing object, then sub-class for parsing Yaml, INI, XML, etc.
iamdave 15y ago
I'd like to add a 4th one: Those arbitrary and excessively long introductory chapters that teach you the history of the language. Granted, that might have some merit in a classroom setting where an instructor is going to ask you a pointless question about who designed the first interpreter, but this is the sort of thing that should be kept to a minimum, or kept out. Zed Shaw's "Learn to code the hard way" are brilliant for this. They get right to it, nothing you don't need to learn and get your hands dirty.
nhebb 15y ago
My pet peeve is books that show the wrong way to do something followed by the right way. If I'm new to a language, I haven't committed these sins yet, so please just skip to the preferred method. All this does is add mental overhead.
- deniska 15y ago
  It seems to be not only programming language books' fault. And not only books' fault. Even teachers at schools and universities sometimes show wrong way of doing something.
lysium 15y ago
...not to mention 'From Beginner to Professional in 28 days!'
jvanderwal 15y ago
How about another one.. "Takes too long to get to the interesting parts." i.e. learning Obj-C and taking until the very last chapter to give even a cursory intro to apps. By the time they get there a ton of people will be burnt out / disinterested.
ValG 15y ago
I believe there is a start-up that is gaining traction that is looking to remedy all of those issues. I can't remember what it's called right now, but the concept is you learn to program online in an environment that shows you where the mistakes are and also what the outcomes are to keep you motivated. Seems like an ideal situation; and frankly it's a little surprising something like this hasn't come out sooner considering most programmers go through this sort of pain... Maybe it's seen as a right of passage, if you can put up with the BS, you deserve to be a programmer?
- ValG 15y ago
  Found it; Codeacademy, http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0 http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0
slimdizzy 15y ago
3: If there are multiple valid solutions to an exercise, list them. If some solutions are better than others, explain why. If there are solutions which are technically invalid but commonly thought up by new programmers, explain what they did wrong. I would also add a forth point: "Overdoing the 'lol im not like those nerdy others programmers, im a regular normal person like you' rhetoric. Instead of mentioning an old cliche (and then trying to distance themselves from it), why not just not mention it at all?
graeme 15y ago
I started learning programming in January using K & R. It is a wonderful book which avoids all of these problems. It's short. You write challenging programs in the tutorial introduction. And the accompanying "C answer book" has good solutions for all the exercises. I also like the fact that each example is a working program. You learn the concepts by applying them. And the exercises really make you think. People say its "not for beginners". I actually think it's an ideal way to start. The "beginner" books are just confusing.
robomartin 15y ago
I'm also pretty tired of "foo" and "bar". At the very least they teach nothing about the thought process that should go into naming things.
- FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
  This is a huge annoyance for me, as is providing an example in the terms of 'A', 'B', 'C', and 'D'. PHP's manual is terrible for this. It's not just a naming problem, but a total failure to explain the purpose of that concept or function with a proper use-case. class A { public function a($a) { $this->a = $a; } } class _A extends A { } class B { public function b($b) { $this->b = $b; } } $foo = new A; $bar = new _A; $baz = new B; .... Another thing is stuff like this: Array.sort(function(a, b) { return a - b; }); Firstly, if you're a beginner, that means absolutely nothing other than an array is being sorted. Secondly, if you do know what it is, it fails to explain what else you might be able to do other than sorting from lowest to highest.
- Tycho 15y ago
  I hate 'foo' and 'bar.' To newcomers they probably conjure up ideas of sin/cos/tan rather than plainly represent placeholder names. 'DoSomething' or 'SomeFunction' or anything like that is prefereble.
- mhartl 15y ago
  I sympathize, but "foo" and "bar" are used when the name is beside the point—i.e., precisely when no thought process should go into naming things. See the entry on "metasyntactic variables" in the Jargon File more more information (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variable.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variabl...).
Confusion 15y ago
Although point #3 has also annoyed me no end, I believe I learned a lot from being forced to solve problems myself. Peeking at the solution is just too easy and severely diminishes what you can learn by being forced to think more about the problem. I believe Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Sipser gets it right: answers to about half the exercises.
erez 15y ago
My pet peeve are books/tutorials that spend most of their time in the interpreter. I appreciate interpreters for what they are, but I don't thing the ability to type 2+3 and get 5 is relevant to any programming language skills.
itmag 15y ago
Random idea: tailor programming books somewhat to personality types? Eg an ENTP and ISTJ are not going to enjoy creating the same kinds of programs.
hackermom 15y ago
"Teach yourself blah in 21 days", anyone?
phatbyte 15y ago
Also: - Please stop including math in every example. I just can't stand see another fibonacci example. Ok we get it, it's awesome for showing recursion, but use other things. Also, don't put math problem on exercises. I'm learning a language, I don't want to recap all my scholl math at the same time. I'll die if I see another "get all the prime numbers from 1 to 100" yada yada yada... - Don't use the concept of "throughout the chapters we will be building an app...", most of the times these apps suck and are plain boring, and it's demotivating for the beginner. Instead create different small apps in every chapter. - Bonus: It would be awesome if books started including a cheat sheet.
- sun123 15y ago
  OMG !are you working as a programer ?
  - phatbyte 15y ago
    OMG yes !!! And do you know how to interpret what you read ? I never said this was for experienced programmers, only to newbies !
aridiculous 15y ago
I was thinking about how I never "look at the language's documentation" when a book or tutorial tells me to. As a beginner/intermediate coder myself, I can't just "look at online documentation" because I don't truly understand how to use it and understand properly. Does anyone have a good resource for learning how to use documentation? I know that may sound trivial to experienced hackers, and possibly paradoxical, but I'm actually quite sincere about this request.
anthonyb 15y ago
Totally agree, except for his point three - beginners typically don't care about exercises, they want to get something working. As long as it works and does what they want, they're happy.

113 points by jsnk 15y ago

pook 15y ago

Point #2 is the Little Coder's problem _Why spoke of: a beginning programmer is likely to be discouraged by the vast difference between the toy programs displayed in introductory books, and the real code that inspired them. I think any purported attempt to teach programming which does not end with the student creating a non-trivial, cool app, is a shame. What went wrong between SICP and current (non-Hartl/Shaw) beginning texts?

tolmasky 15y ago

I'm no expert, but I think it's possible that the fact that's a book at all may be a failing. The goal is to get them writing code and seeing results, as well as mimicking their later real world experience of experimenting to find the right answer. That's why I think things like code academy better reflect the way we'll be teaching this in the future.

evincarofautumn 15y ago
I’m not sure I agree. Sure, programming is a craft, and the only way to learn it is to do it. But I see no reason why a book can’t serve as an introduction, giving the reader projects to complete and guidance toward completing them. Being that they lack interactivity and mentorship, sure, books are difficult to make into what beginners need. But just because they’re not the best medium doesn’t mean they should be completely discounted.
- tolmasky 15y ago
  Let me begin by saying that I don't think books aren't the right approach for every programmer - simply true beginners. In my experience beginner programmers get stuck very quickly on very small and frustrating bugs, such as not understanding how to put together the syntax. If they can't overcome this quickly, you may completely lose them. This is where the book completely fails as it can provide no further assistance. Even if the answer is provided in the printed text, the individual may not "see" the difference between what they've typed and what the book has printed (it may take a while to get used to the computer-level of exactness you need when comparing code, and to overcome some punctuation blindness they may have developed from normal reading, etc.). Similarly, I believe it is bad to read too much before doing anything, because as you read you believe you are following along: "uh huh, that makes sense, sure, got it...", then a whole chapter in you may actually start coding and notice you don't really know what's going on (or again, simply think you don't due to some simple syntax mistake). Now the individual will feel overwhelmed as they have an entire chapter's worth of material that they may or may not understand. Even if there are exercises in the middle, people often say "oh thats easy and makes sense" and skip it since its a "waste of time" (which is bad, because its very easy to think you understand something when they don't). Having seen a few people use codeacademy, I now believe that it may need to be taken a step further: I think for the first few exercises the code should actually be ghosted so that the user is literally "tracing" over it (as opposed to the current technique of saying "now type this in the console"). For example, as I described in a previous comment, one person got completely stuck because it said "Now type variable.length.". The user didn't notice that the last period wasn't part of the code and unfortunately the error isn't very beginner-friendly: "Expected an identifier but found '}' instead" -- "what, I didn't type a }? And what's an identifier?". I believe ghosting the text and beeping when you type a character that doesn't match can give you a feel for the code -- its kind of how rewriting notes really helps it sink in vs. just reading them. Then, slowly take the training wheels off.
  - Hyena 15y ago
    You are basically describing the LXTHW model.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Apocryphon 15y ago

#1 is a great point and a great recommend. There is certainly a place for long, ponderous reference book-like tomes, but they are a poor substitute for concise beginner books. Eloquent JavaScript is amazing in that respect.

GlennS 15y ago
I think the right approach would be to print the concise beginner book and bind it with 1000 blank pages. That way it won't be too daunting for the learner, but can still perform well in a secondary role as a monitor stand once they're done with it. More seriously, I think that the discipline of making a shorter book usually produces better writing. If you're going to write something longer than say 300 pages (about 1 K&R-length) you'd better have a lot of interesting things to say.
- Someone 15y ago
  I agree ('the internet' thinks this idea is from Pascal: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.") Problem is that that short book, having taken more effort to write, would have to be more expensive (paper, printing, distribution, etc. cost 'nothing' for any book worth anything at all). Selling a shorter book for more money is possible, but customers typically prefer the longer book ("more is better, and even if it is not, I just don't read the extra stuff")
  - LewisCr 15y ago
    I thought loisirs were rentals?
  - aridiculous 15y ago
    Which is why you have to find the cracks in the inefficient market. Thank god for passionate individuals not driven primarily by money.

zdw 15y ago

The "worthless example to explain features" in my pet peeve... This is something like "we're going to have a class named Vehicle" and "class Car inherits Vehicle" in an OO language. You would almost never use something like this in a real program, and it takes what's a minor and problem fraught feature (inheritance) and quickly has new programmers creating bizzaro hierarchies that never should be.

turkeygizzard 15y ago
Forgive me, but I'm really new to programming, and I don't really understand why your example is something that shouldn't be used in real programming. Should a Car be a Vehicle object instead of a sub-class?
- driax 15y ago
  The problem lies in that you never have a "Car" which should inherit "Vehicle". It's a question that never comes up in programming. The bad part of it, is that it sometimes makes new programmers look for these kind of concepts in their code, and write class-based code around them. Exactly the problem http://pyvideo.org/video/880/stop-writing-classes http://pyvideo.org/video/880/stop-writing-classes discusses. Basicly it teaches people to think in taxonomies, which is not good for object-oriented programming since it usually results in highly complicated code, with way to many classes and inheritance. Inheritance is mostly good for factoring out common code between different sub-classes. Or extending library classes in a way that wasn't thought of when they were written.
  - zdw 15y ago
    Ditto on this. It's an abuse of the concept of inheritance, which teaches the wrong reasons to use the concept.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - nikcub 15y ago
    I don't think I have ever read a programming book that teaches OO in the same way that most developers use it - that is implement top level first and then when you have commonalities between objects abstract them out into parent objects. Thinking about and mapping out class hierarchies is something that Java enterprise analysts do. A good example to teach OO would be a config parser. Write a config parsing object, then sub-class for parsing Yaml, INI, XML, etc.

iamdave 15y ago

I'd like to add a 4th one: Those arbitrary and excessively long introductory chapters that teach you the history of the language. Granted, that might have some merit in a classroom setting where an instructor is going to ask you a pointless question about who designed the first interpreter, but this is the sort of thing that should be kept to a minimum, or kept out. Zed Shaw's "Learn to code the hard way" are brilliant for this. They get right to it, nothing you don't need to learn and get your hands dirty.

nhebb 15y ago

My pet peeve is books that show the wrong way to do something followed by the right way. If I'm new to a language, I haven't committed these sins yet, so please just skip to the preferred method. All this does is add mental overhead.

deniska 15y ago
It seems to be not only programming language books' fault. And not only books' fault. Even teachers at schools and universities sometimes show wrong way of doing something.

lysium 15y ago

...not to mention 'From Beginner to Professional in 28 days!'

jvanderwal 15y ago

How about another one.. "Takes too long to get to the interesting parts." i.e. learning Obj-C and taking until the very last chapter to give even a cursory intro to apps. By the time they get there a ton of people will be burnt out / disinterested.

ValG 15y ago

I believe there is a start-up that is gaining traction that is looking to remedy all of those issues. I can't remember what it's called right now, but the concept is you learn to program online in an environment that shows you where the mistakes are and also what the outcomes are to keep you motivated. Seems like an ideal situation; and frankly it's a little surprising something like this hasn't come out sooner considering most programmers go through this sort of pain... Maybe it's seen as a right of passage, if you can put up with the BS, you deserve to be a programmer?

ValG 15y ago
Found it; Codeacademy, http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0 http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0

slimdizzy 15y ago

3: If there are multiple valid solutions to an exercise, list them. If some solutions are better than others, explain why. If there are solutions which are technically invalid but commonly thought up by new programmers, explain what they did wrong. I would also add a forth point: "Overdoing the 'lol im not like those nerdy others programmers, im a regular normal person like you' rhetoric. Instead of mentioning an old cliche (and then trying to distance themselves from it), why not just not mention it at all?

graeme 15y ago

I started learning programming in January using K & R. It is a wonderful book which avoids all of these problems. It's short. You write challenging programs in the tutorial introduction. And the accompanying "C answer book" has good solutions for all the exercises. I also like the fact that each example is a working program. You learn the concepts by applying them. And the exercises really make you think. People say its "not for beginners". I actually think it's an ideal way to start. The "beginner" books are just confusing.

robomartin 15y ago

I'm also pretty tired of "foo" and "bar". At the very least they teach nothing about the thought process that should go into naming things.

FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
This is a huge annoyance for me, as is providing an example in the terms of 'A', 'B', 'C', and 'D'. PHP's manual is terrible for this. It's not just a naming problem, but a total failure to explain the purpose of that concept or function with a proper use-case. class A { public function a($a) { $this->a = $a; } } class _A extends A { } class B { public function b($b) { $this->b = $b; } } $foo = new A; $bar = new _A; $baz = new B; .... Another thing is stuff like this: Array.sort(function(a, b) { return a - b; }); Firstly, if you're a beginner, that means absolutely nothing other than an array is being sorted. Secondly, if you do know what it is, it fails to explain what else you might be able to do other than sorting from lowest to highest.
Tycho 15y ago
I hate 'foo' and 'bar.' To newcomers they probably conjure up ideas of sin/cos/tan rather than plainly represent placeholder names. 'DoSomething' or 'SomeFunction' or anything like that is prefereble.
mhartl 15y ago
I sympathize, but "foo" and "bar" are used when the name is beside the point—i.e., precisely when no thought process should go into naming things. See the entry on "metasyntactic variables" in the Jargon File more more information (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variable.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variabl...).

Confusion 15y ago

Although point #3 has also annoyed me no end, I believe I learned a lot from being forced to solve problems myself. Peeking at the solution is just too easy and severely diminishes what you can learn by being forced to think more about the problem. I believe Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Sipser gets it right: answers to about half the exercises.

erez 15y ago

My pet peeve are books/tutorials that spend most of their time in the interpreter. I appreciate interpreters for what they are, but I don't thing the ability to type 2+3 and get 5 is relevant to any programming language skills.

itmag 15y ago

Random idea: tailor programming books somewhat to personality types? Eg an ENTP and ISTJ are not going to enjoy creating the same kinds of programs.

hackermom 15y ago

"Teach yourself blah in 21 days", anyone?

phatbyte 15y ago

Also: - Please stop including math in every example. I just can't stand see another fibonacci example. Ok we get it, it's awesome for showing recursion, but use other things. Also, don't put math problem on exercises. I'm learning a language, I don't want to recap all my scholl math at the same time. I'll die if I see another "get all the prime numbers from 1 to 100" yada yada yada... - Don't use the concept of "throughout the chapters we will be building an app...", most of the times these apps suck and are plain boring, and it's demotivating for the beginner. Instead create different small apps in every chapter. - Bonus: It would be awesome if books started including a cheat sheet.

sun123 15y ago
OMG !are you working as a programer ?
- phatbyte 15y ago
  OMG yes !!! And do you know how to interpret what you read ? I never said this was for experienced programmers, only to newbies !

aridiculous 15y ago

I was thinking about how I never "look at the language's documentation" when a book or tutorial tells me to. As a beginner/intermediate coder myself, I can't just "look at online documentation" because I don't truly understand how to use it and understand properly. Does anyone have a good resource for learning how to use documentation? I know that may sound trivial to experienced hackers, and possibly paradoxical, but I'm actually quite sincere about this request.

anthonyb 15y ago

Totally agree, except for his point three - beginners typically don't care about exercises, they want to get something working. As long as it works and does what they want, they're happy.