Get Coding 2 - A Review

Get Coding 2 

by

David Whitney

This book is aimed at the middle school child who wants a gentle introduction to coding. It accomplishes that goal - but little else. The writing style is suitable for the child in 5th through 8th grade. It may be a bit much for younger children (unless very talented). Older teens might feel like they are being talked down to. Some adults may find the presentation helpful (this reader did) if they can overlook the obvious tone of the book aimed at younger readers.

All the code needed to complete the five projects discussed in the book are included in the book and online. The reader could easily just copy and paste the code if they are visual learners. As a tactile learner, this reader found it better to actually type in the code presented in the book.

Basic descriptions are given for the formats of each statement, but few details are given for the meaning behind the statements. To truly understand the language, the student will need another resource or a knowledgeable instructor. I first ran into this with project 1 when trying to create a tic-tac-toe board on screen. For example, the layout is created using HTML and CSS. The need for a second style statement (see page 29) to create three rows of boxes of three boxes is still not clear to me. Also, the browser gave different output than shown in the text before adding the second style (the book has nine horizontal boxes, Chrome produced nine vertical boxes). Adding the second style statement corrected the problem - but it left me confused.

The book is great for playing around with code, but not for learning to code. I would give the book 3-½ stars, but will round up to four, given the book’s intended audience.
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This review is based on a free electronic copy provided by the publisher for the purpose of creating this review. The opinions expressed are my own.