Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

A Very Late Book Review


I have to start off by apologizing for how very late this review is, an embarrassing long time ago, the kind folks at No Starch Press very kindly gave me a copy of “Super Scratch Programming Adventure” to review. Scratch for those that aren’t familiar is a kids oriented programming language designed by Mitchel Resnick of the MIT Media Lab, the same team that developed the programmable bricks for Lego Mindstorms.

The book is in manga format and very entertaining and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It was so much fun, that when my then ten year old asked to learn how to program with the long term goal of writing his own minecraft mods, I handed him the book and asked him what he thought. To say he whipped through the book is an understatement. He actually finished it in one reading and immediately asked if he could start playing with Scratch on the family laptop.

Over the next few days he worked his way through some of the programs in the book and put the book aside for a long while. Recently we were talking about an upcoming Lego robotics class he had coming up and he remembered that he had the copy of “Super Scratch Programming Adventure” in his room. He dug it out and this time he worked his way through all the programs quite quickly.

I asked him what he thought of the book and said it was very good; that he really liked the comic book format and that he wished more books were done that way. At this point he’s excited enough that we’ll either dig deeper into Scratch together or we’ll switch to a games oriented text like No Starch’s “Realm of Racket” or possibly Sweigarts’s “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python”.

Regardless of what we decide to do however, I can highly recommend ““Super Scratch Programming Adventure” as a great introduction to programming for kids or even non-kids who want a first very friendly exposure to programming. And again, my apologies to the folks at No Starch Press for taking so long on this review.