I continue to have a lot of time to work on my BleAx program lately because the kids are in the midst of their last round of midterms, semester research reports, and preparation for finals. BleAx is the program Kelly uses to accumulate her Betty Blonde comic strips. I have made a lot of progress on the program, adding new functionality, and making it easier to use. Posting here will continue to be light until I have finished the release version of BleAx. I also need to rebuild the Betty Blonde website. It is very much a mess right now. I plan to use the ComicPress theme in a WordPress blog, then add functionality to post newly accumulated strips from BleAx right to the blog along with some commentary. After we get Kelly drawing her strip again, we need to do a bunch of how-to documentation and videos on how to use BleAx. I will still post here now and again, but will bias my efforts more toward finishing these projects until they are complete.
Hi Ken,
Can you recommend a good curriculum for a kid to teach themselves about computer programming? I know NOTHING about it and am at a loss. I don’t understand anything that you say when you talk about computer programming. How can a kid who may be interested in this pursue it when his parents lack in this area?
Ruthie
Hey Ruthie,
The question you are asking is not an easy one. The way we did it is probably a little different because I am a professional programmer. We started with a book called C++ Primer Plus, but that is certainly not for the faint of heart. The only reason it worked is because I was available all the time to help out. If had to do it over again, I would probably start with something a little easier. I like Python a lot. It is a language that is fairly ubiquitous, handles a lot of the problems that cause beginning programmers fits, is used by MANY professional programmers, and runs on Windows, Linux, and Apple computers. I learned it from stuff on the web. There are tons of tutorials on how to start from zero and get to a very high programming level. Here is link to a great tutorial: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/. Let me know if that helps. –Ken
Thanks Ken, I will certainly look into that…