David Whitney

A great, easy to follow coding book that is geared to a tween crowd, but works well for adults also. The book starts with a brief introduction to and background on electronic games and gaming. It combines several coding languages, which is a little difficult for the reader to decipher between. I read this with having had only an intro. to HTML almost 20 yrs. ago, as well as basicA in the late 1980s, so I'm pretty much a coding newbie. I made a mistake with using a capital instead of lower case letter in the first game and was thankful for my F12 knowledge to discover my syntax error. The second game was easier to code and went along faster for me. A great intro. Book that gives short bursts of accomplishment to keep the readers' interest.… (mehr)

As a recently retired computer programmer who learned his trade "back in the day" I was curious to see how kids are being introduced to this strange art called "writing computer programs" nowadays.

This book is meant for kids and so you have to take it for what it's worth. It gives the reader a quick intro to HTML (The language of Internet web sites) and JavaScript (The procedural language behind some Internet web sites). So thats good.

And I dunno. Not clear what the age audience for this book is? Would younger kids have the patience to type in all this code ? Would older kids be interested in these rather simple games?

A kid who read this book and had the patience would come out of the other end with some simple working games to show his friends.

And some understanding of how it all works under the covers. And maybe curiosity piqued to look for more and go forward..

There's not enough here about debugging and solving the problems that come up (inevitably) when you sit down to write computer code. So a lot of kids (unless they have help from some friendly adults) might get frustrated and lose patience and put the book aside.

But maybe this will be the gateway into computer programming.

I'm not satisfied by this book, but I can't for the life of me think of any way to make it better.… (mehr)