Book Readathon

[Ashok Bakthavathsalam]

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781934356593.do

Can you suggest a good resource person to go through this book with
student graduates?
What kind of format would you recommend?

% ashok

[Dorai Thodla]

Yuvi, Vagmi.

Dorai

[JAGANADH G]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 8:14 PM, Ashok Bakthavathsalam <lifeb...@gmail.com> wrote:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781934356593.do

It is a wondeful book . It teaches Perl,Pyhton, Ruby etc.........
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JAGANADH G
http://jaganadhg.in
ILUGCBE
http://ilugcbe.org.in

[Ashok Bakthavathsalam]

Jagan,

(http://racket-lang.org/) – has anyone had (or know of anyone else who has) experience using the Racket system (Scheme – a Lisp variant) as an introductory course in programming? I read a section (reproduced below) related to my question on http://mcsp.wartburg.edu/zelle/python/python-first.html - what is your personal opinion about Scheme (versus) Python?

4.7 What About Scheme?

To those who have been using Scheme in the introductory class, the call for a simple first language is nothing new. Scheme has many features in common with scripting languages in that it is small, dynamic and interactive. (In fact, it is often used as a scripting language.) Scheme is a good choice for a first language because it is simple and powerful. Scheme allows for the discussion of various programming paradigms, and there are several very good textbooks for CS1 using Scheme. It would seem to be an ideal choice.

The weakness of Scheme is that it is perceived as a marginal language that is quite different from the system languages that are used elsewhere in the curriculum. This has limited its popularity in CS1. Python offers many of the advantages of Scheme while still being similar to languages such as C++, Java, and Ada, thus easing the transition to those languages. For those wishing to explore multiple programming paradigms in the first courses, Python has support for the functional style including first-order functions, map, apply, lambda and closures.

[Yuvi Panda]

Scheme is pretty nice as a 'first' language because it has minimal
syntax - a bright student can master all the syntax of scheme in about
2-3 hours, so you can actually concentrate on learning 'programming'
concepts rather than just 'syntax'. Most people spend way too much
time trying to memorize where exactly the semicolon goes or where all
you need 'break' to think about programming at a conceptual level.

Scheme > Python >> C, C++ or Java

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Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog