[Techtalk] programming for beginners

[Maria McKinley]

Gayathri Swaminathan wrote:
> Ah, I see now what you are asking.
> 
> Am not familiar with Turbo Basic - so your explanation helped clarify the
> feature set.
> 
> Python shines as a good choice to understand some basics if you are new to
> programming. Gold first programming language.
> 
> The command line IDE that comes along with Python is very educative. Meaning
> it helps you try things/ learn things without having to know much about
> programming.
> 
> Had the fortunate experience of attending class taught by Mark Lutz - author
> of "programming python".
> 
> For GUI-ish choices, there are several projects such as
> wxWidgets/wxDesigner...web frameworks such as Django, dabo, turbogears that
> are interesting ways to learn python programming.
> 
> But this: http://www.pythonchallenge.com/ was fun as well.
> 
> The Eclipse project recently introduced a "Visual editor" not long ago,
> which is supposed to help one do easy JAVA gui programming
> 
> Drag drop things and code away in Java it seems ( not done it personally)
> 
> Gayathri
> 

My daughter has an xo laptop (from the one laptop per child 
organization), and it runs some variant of ubuntu, I think, but at any 
rate it only has open source on it. It has a program called turtle 
graphics, which is pretty cute and based on logo. You can make if then 
statements, for loops, etc. that cause different graphics to 
appear/disappear, change, whatever. I looked at their site, and they 
have a whole list of logo sorts of programs.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LOGO

cheers,
maria