I've read through the sample of this book and looked at the TOC and read Hello World from Manning, and honestly, as someone who has worked teaching programming

I've read through the sample of this book and looked at the TOC and read Hello World from Manning, and honestly, as someone who has worked teaching programming to this age range, they kind of suck. They don't teach kids how to think about programming. Their first instinct is to assault them with syntax and use words that aren't readily part of a kid's vocabulary (for example, introducing the concept of "types" and coercing (using that word) between them in like Chapter 3 is just a recipe for disaster) in an effort to give the kid results. "If they don't see results, they won't stick with it!" Bull crap. If you give them great results for the first hour, but then it becomes incredibly frustrating to proceed because they don't understand the fundamentals well enough to do anything useful, you're not doing anyone a favor. I know Hello World was co-written with the author's son, and so obviously this isn't an across the board problem. But in my experience, if you don't teach how computers work (in general), how programs work (i.e., you type stuff, the computer does it, etc.), and how to develop logical thinking about problems and how to break them down, all you'll be teaching to do is ape the book until they want riff on it, at which point it just becomes an exercise in frustration. There is always a learning curve, but I firmly believe that there is a very linear progression of thought that you can teach in that will make the learning curve much smoother for most of the kids trying to learn. I've been doing work on a book of my own very, very slowly, but I'm hoping to fix a lot of the pedagogical failures I see in these books. Maybe it'll come out soon, but then again, the world ends tomorrow, so why bother? :)