Starting Out With Alice Edition Unstated

My professor didn't require a specific textbook for our community college beginning programming class so I bought this one because it was priced decently (less than $20, probably closer to $5) and I had looked through a copy of it at the local library and it looked interesting. It's a pretty easy introduction to Alice and if you also use the tutorials on the Alice website - [...] - anyone could probably be coding in a few hours. High school or middle school students as well as adults with no programming experience should be able to use this book easily. For those who know programming this book may seem pretty basic, especially since Alice seems to be easy to learn for most folks, but I'm glad to have it as a reference and to reinforce topics from lectures.My copy of the book came with a CD with Alice 2.2 which is what we use in my class and also what is available for free on the Alice website, although they are up to version 3.2.5 right now. I also got a book with an unused code that gave me access to videos by the author, Gaddis, so that was a great bonus as my book was a used book and didn't guarantee the usability of extra materials.The screenshots and format of programming concepts within the text make the material easy to read and the extra videos made learnign Alice pretty easy for my class. Gaddis has written books for other programming languages, so based on this book I'd probably look at his others as my classes progress.

This is for the first edition of this book and I'm writing this review in 2012, after the second edition has come out.I bought the first edition of this book for a song here. My needs are very simple: I am interested in learning JavaScript and PHP well enough to be able to handle JavaScript and jQuery with a reasonable amount of confidence and do extremely straightforward back-end web development for my planned website. Practically every beginner book in JavaScript, jQuery, and PHP will assure you in a blurb on the cover that you don't need to know any programming in order to be able to use the book with confidence, and you will find that is a black lie marinated in greed and roasted over hellfire.After you get past the first chapter of these books, which the publishers understand a non-programmer will browse in the bookstore before buying it, every book I've tried to use to learn this stuff starts rattling off the compuspeak like nobody's business and expects you to follow along nicely. When you can't, well, the obvious assumption to make is that it's your fault. And that's not the truth -- you need a better book written by a better teacher. In all honesty, how can you expect someone who chooses to submit a author's picture of themselves skateboarding (HeadFirst JavaScript) or someone who forgets to thank his students and instead offers thanks to God in his acknowledgments for gifting him with natural teaching ability (JavaScript, A Beginner's Guide) to be able to teach their way out of a paper bag?I understood that I wanted the simplest possible introduction to basic programming and I dug through the introductory programming books available on Amazon until I found this one. I also cheated as much as I could -- I went to my local community college's website and found the introductory textbook they use in the first half of the first semester of their first Introduction to Programming class. Well, a copy of the cheapest second edition currently costs exactly 572 times the price of the cheapest first edition, so I reasoned that for my purposes, this edition couldn't be 572 times worse than that one, and so I put down my money.And now I've got it. All of the basic concepts I needed to be able to work in PHP and JavaScript are here, taught by a master teacher, Tony Gaddis, who knows exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it, using a teaching programming interface designed by a legendary figure in human-computer interactions, the late Randy Pausch of _The Last Lecture_. Alice is purposely designed to be the simplest possible way to learn basic programming in preparation for tackling more difficult programming languages. It doesn't matter who you are and what your background is -- you can use Alice with this book and learn the most basic elements of programming.I don't plan on setting the world on fire with my computer work, but now that I've completed the book (in 16 slow evenings after 8-hour work shifts) I can understand a great deal more of the seemingly impenetrable terminology of more difficult books and the future looks a lot brighter than it did about two weeks ago.Some of the elements you need to self-teach aren't here, so you won't be able to check the additional "extra-credit" projects or get answers to the review questions at the end of chapters, and you absolutely need the CD this book comes with for the practice worlds the author has created to complete the many, many clear step-by-step tutorials, but you can use this book by yourself and get a good introduction to basic programming as a non-programmer who has issues with this kind of stuff, a non-programmer who can't stand this stuff, a non-programmer who has an idea and no background in computer science, whatever kind of non-programmer you are.Please, have a look at my other reviews before you trust this one, by all means. I am not in any way being paid or otherwise rewarded to write this five-star recommendation. I cannot recommend this book more strongly for the purposes I've outlined above.My only complaint is that the book is too short. Some of the projects in the last two chapters are a bit rushed and I would have preferred not to have to do so much work to understand arrays and recursion, but hey, nobody's perfect, and Gaddis may have rewritten that in the second edition.

Absolutely love this book. The software comes with it, and if you can't get the software to work on your computer, you can download it from the Alice website. The book makes the software easy to use, and the book itself is very easy to read. I have already recommended it to my friends. This software is so easy to use that my 9 and 13 year old sisters could use it. They didn't bother with the book, but they had fun playing with the software and were able to figure out how to use it.NOTE: I don't know what system the software in the book is for (Mac or Windows), but you can always go to the publisher's website and download it for a Mac (that is the computer I have).

I bought this book for an intro to programming class. Although it didn't completely close the gap when I went to take Java, I did feel that I knew a lot of the terminology from this book and my mindset was where it needed to be. I think that those two elements are the most important, so this book definitely delivered there.There is not actual coding, but it teaches you the structure and how different actions will affect other areas. I think that it would be a big help for those who want to ease themselves into programming and it would even be fun for older kids who want to learn.

If you buy the book new, it has an access code specifically saying that you get a prepaid subscription providing you with full access to all student support areas including:- Web Sections and Chapters- VideoNotesThough when you sign up online all you have access to are the "VideoNotes". I would not have opened the access code if I could not have access to the chapters. SO THAT WAS A TOTAL LIE. I even contacted the publisher to verify this:"We investigated and found only video notes are available for this book."I think the publisher should do something about it.Other than that, the book is OK.

Good one

Great book. Had a lot of screenshots and all the instructions were very simple and easy to follow. Chapter's were a reasonable length and I never felt overwhelmed by anything.

:) Nice