1 Comment for Beginning Programming For Dummies

• 1. Zulema  |  September 17th, 2010 at 3:02 am

  This review is from: Beginning Programming for Dummies (Paperback)

  As a programmer, when I first read this book through I thought that it wasn’t the best written of the Dummies books, but it was a reasonable introduction that gave a good overview of some of the basics. However, having seen people with no experience of programming at all try to work their way through this book, I’ve also noticed that the author has sometimes failed to really explain himself in the clear and thorough way that the Dummies books are so good at, and has lost sight of who the book should be aimed at – people with NO experience of programming at all.

  My biggest gripe of all is with the use of variable names, on two counts. Firstly, he’ll sometimes use variable names that simply won’t make any sense – names that have absolutely nothing to do with what the variable is actually being used for within the code. While this doesn’t cause a problem with programming, and certainly won’t confuse an experienced programmer within such simple coding, it can completely throw people who haven’t used a programming language before – it adds unnecessary confusion to code that’s mainly intended for complete beginners.

  It’s also a bad introduction to naming conventions for anyone who’ll write code for others to use, as people SHOULD try to make their choices of variable names make sense. It’s a bad idea even if nobody else EVER reads it, because if you decide to come back to your code after a year, who knows if you’ll still remember what “boing” was supposed to be?

  The second issue I have is that he’ll repeat the confusion for newcomers by sometimes naming things too similarly. Experienced programmers, again, won’t have a problem with this; but for the newcomers who’re trying to become familiar with the language, it can confuse them – this is made more likely by the fact that many will already be struggling to come to terms with the code they’re working through. Having a variable called test$ and a routine called [test] may seem fine to experienced programmers, but when test$ is actually the value of a radio button, there are much plainer and easier names that the variable could have been given to help avoid confusion for the novice programmer. It could simply have been thought through better, and more consideration should have been given with regard to who this book was intended for.

  When compared to some of the other Dummies texts, most of which people could work through from top to bottom without needing much or any assistance, this one falls short of the mark. Beyond just the confusion created by bad choices of names for variables and functions, some of the explanations are unclear – or leave some elements completely unexplained – leaving the unfamiliar programmer out of their depth, with no experience to call on to deduce what the commands or code may actually be doing.

  In the end, I simply wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone who is trying to learn programming from scratch on their own. With some help, it provides a place for programmers to build, but too often the people I’ve seen work through this have ended up FEELING like Dummies as they became baffled and lost off by the book’s sometimes careless style.

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