Goals

Like

my previous book

,

this book has come to be structured around the process of teaching the

language. In particular, my motivation is to create something that provides me

with a way to teach the language in my own seminars. When I think of a chapter

in the book, I think in terms of what makes a good lesson during a seminar. My

goal is to get bite-sized pieces that can be taught in a reasonable amount of

time, followed by exercises that are feasible to accomplish in a classroom

situation.

My

goals in this book are to:

1. Present
   the material one simple step at a time so that you can easily digest each
   concept before moving on.
2. Use
   examples that are as simple and short as possible. This sometimes prevents me
   from tackling “real world” problems, but I’ve found that
   beginners are usually happier when they can understand every detail of an
   example rather than being impressed by the scope of the problem it solves.
   Also, there’s a severe limit to the amount of code that can be absorbed
   in a classroom situation. For this I will no doubt receive criticism for using
   “toy examples,” but I’m willing to accept that in favor of
   producing something pedagogically useful.
3. Carefully
   sequence the presentation of features so that you aren’t seeing something
   that you haven’t been exposed to. Of course, this isn’t always
   possible; in those situations, a brief introductory description is given.
4. Give
   you what I think is important for you to understand about the language, rather
   than everything I know. I believe there is an information importance hierarchy,
   and that there are some facts that 95 percent of programmers will never need to
   know and just confuses people and adds to their perception of the complexity of
   the language. To take an example from C, if you memorize the operator
   precedence table (I never did), you can write clever code. But if you need to
   think about it, it will also confuse the reader/maintainer of that code. So
   forget about precedence, and use parentheses when things aren’t clear.
5. Keep
   each section focused enough so that the lecture time – and the time
   between exercise periods – is small. Not only does this keep the
   audience’s minds more active and involved during a hands-on seminar, but
   it gives the reader a greater sense of accomplishment.
6. Provide
   you with a solid foundation so that you can understand the issues well enough
   to move on to more difficult coursework and books.
   

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