Editorial Reviews
Product Description: Starting Out with Alice: A Visual Introduction to Programming presents a fun and motivational way for novice programmers to learn the basic tenets of programming. Using Alice, an innovative and increasingly popular teaching tool, readers from a variety of backgrounds create virtual programming worlds of animations and computer games.
Introduction to Alice and Objects; Programming in Alice; Variables, Functions, Math, and Strings; Decision and Repetition Structures; Methods, Functions, and More about Variables; Events; Lists and Arrays; Recursion.
For all readers interested in programming using Alice.
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
Very helpful!, October 17, 2008
By
A. Thompson (Fortuna, CA USA)
I would recommend this book for all beginners with not only programming itself, but also with Alice 2.0. The book is wonderfully detailed with definitions of terms used frequently, photographic examples of how each step is supposed to look as well as very simple-to-follow tutorials in every chapter. The text is very easy to read and understand as well, very rarely does it ever NOT simplify or provide examples/demonstrations for a concept. Even better, at the end of each chapter there are a set of multiple choice, short answer and exercise questions to help make all the information learned stick just a bit more in your head.
The only downsides to this textbook are that there is no glossary of terms (a feature that would have been very helpful when it comes to programming), and many of the tutorials are very simplistic--something which is good at first, but grows a little boring when you find yourself wanting something of a challenge. And finally, Alice itself tends to have a few glitches here and there (mainly only in that it can slow things down and even take a few minutes to load).
Overall, I'd say this book is worth the price. I give it four out of five stars.
