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Making a better textbook (was Re: The Deitel book)

Simon Callan simon at callan.demon.co.uk
Thu Nov 7 14:45:02 EST 2002 
In message <mailman.1036684936.1235.python-list at python.org>
          Dave Brueck <dave at pythonapocrypha.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Dave Reed wrote:
> 
> > I've been using Python for my own projects (from short scripts to
> > 25,000 line apps) for almost three years now and can't imagine
> > using anything else right for anything that wasn't extremely
> > computationally expensive. After attending the panel, I talked my
> > other colleagues into using it for our CS 1 course this fall. The
> > only thing that bothers me about Python for teaching is the lack
> > of enforced private members for classes. As an experienced
> > programmer, I can live with that because I know better, but I
> > don't know whether the students will believe me when I tell them
> > it's a bad idea to directly access them outside of classes :-)
> 
> Who cares if they believe you though, and why should they anyway?
> Part of becoming a good programmer is getting bit by taking
> shortcuts (over doing it the "right" way), learning from it, and
> moving on - and it's a great thing to learn through experience that
> the prof might actually know what  he's talking about! :)

If you are feeling cruel, you could give them a library that has both
exposed internals, and proper interface functions, and then halfway
through the course, change the library so that anyone who doesn't use
the correct interface finds that subtle bugs have been introduced into
their code.

Simon
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