> I have been looking for books targeted to beginner programmers so I could recommend them to my friends, but most books unfortunately fail on this point. My f

> I have been looking for books targeted to beginner programmers so I could recommend them to my friends, but most books unfortunately fail on this point. My favourite book for this by far is How to Design Programs: http://htdp.org http://htdp.org It assumes knowledge of arithmetic and maybe a tiny bit of algebra but not much else.