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Sunday, November 10, 2013

Teach Your Kids How to Code | Book Recommendations for Young Adults

Disclaimer: this post is obviously laced with beloved not Amazon referral links. Use at your own... nah, all it means is that you are contributing about a few cents to CodeSumBlog yay for sustainable blogging.

Disclaimer 2: adults, don't be discouraged by the titles. I think the books recommended below are perfect for adults too. A much better alternative to dummy books on programming.

Time sensitive discount code: tech book publishing mogul O'reilly has a limited time discount for programming books or tech books for kids WKCODEKID
This deal expires November 14, 2013 at 5:00am PT and cannot be combined with other offers. Offer does not apply to or "Print & Ebook" bundle pricing.

I am a firm believer of alternative educations, because it just works for a lot of kids (and mainstream education too! I don't believe MOOC > school. I loved all my schools). Honestly, taking your young kids to watch Ender's Game or the Universal Studio's special effects show to see how minions come to life via CG and just how every movie and TV is green screen enabled ... probably works the magic! Hint hint, most of my Stanford friends who are superb engineers and founders have parents who already know engineering (and was taught math early on). Yup, get to it fast, if you are a happy fluffy person like me. My kids are definitely hanging out with engineers early on. Mark Zuckerberg said at 2013 Startup School, mostly he just built things when he was young (you know those garage fun times with daddies? working the toolbox? Now it's working on Ender's desk). By the time he quit Harvard, he already built multiple applications with thousands of users.

If you haven't already, allow your kids to try Codecademy.com, whose users can range all ages and countries. It's gamified.  Get them to think about Minecraft but not just playing, but building plugins. Please don't make them read dummy books. Kids are very smart and capable to learn (hello the whole point of Ender's Game), let them learn from legit real books.

I recommend the No Starch Press (to support this blog you can purchase from this amazon referral). No Starch Press is closely tied with O'Reilly (all mighty Wikipedia talks about O'Reilly Media distributes and promotes No Starch Press titles in the U.S., and No Starch uses various distributors worldwide.)

In fact No Starch Press talks about Wikipedia, building with Legos and also

  • Linux
  • Command line
  • Internet protocols
  • HTML CSS JavaScript
  • Full stack
  • Photoshop
  • R (for data analysis, statistics and social science researches in general)
    • yes as an neotany economists (with only Bachelor of Arts), I can safely say, no future social science will be safely exempted from knowing how to conduct research and analyze the research
    • yup Economics + math, political science + math, journalism + math, law + math
When I first visited Cornell, they say I must have played Legos to be a sound engineer in the future. Now I think one needs to know how to program to succeed in all disciplines. Modern academic skills are : reading, writing, public speaking, searching (as in Google), programming, data analysis.

Dear parents, please start early. Kids are so capable of learning languages (natural, foreign and programming languages), do them a favor get them started early so they don't have to start late like me : ) cheers. And it's okay if you don't know how to program. Kids will figure it out. You don't know how to play Minecraft either. But you probably *read* Ender's Game so do something.

Sheryl Sandberg also recently said on Quora, breaking the gender imbalance early is an important step to get girls code more. Since many of us agree that programming is an important skills. Let's make sure girls have it early and solid.

Inspiring female coders early: YouNoodle showcasing amazing women's initiatives in the bay area hackbrightacademy Women Who Code Women 2.0 as female founder resources. In my opinion, these are some of the most important initiatives and community efforts, especially Women Who Code which is completely open to all for attendance. Featured video http://vimeo.com/78776386

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