Listen, they don’t let you be captain of the enterprise if you can’t hack the software it runs on.

Couldn’t agree more.

My wife wanted to get into programming. After a lot of searching, she found Pine’s book. It was exactly what she needed to get started.

This is the best programming book I have ever read.

I’m a designer. Tried many times to learn some programming but never got motivated enough until I found this book a week ago…

So far it has been great gfor learning and really fun to read!

I Highly recommend it to anyone too

This is the book to learn programming. I love Chris.

It’s amazing how accessible and affordable it is to learn a new trade these days. Just as Gason, with no other background than HTML and CSS, it was hard to find a good book to start, and this one is a must.

I’ve also found a course on iTunesU, Stanford’s CS106a. No requirements needed, it’s the ideal place to start and learn about the basic concepts of programming. The teacher (Mehran Sahami) is great and the pdfs are available on the course’s website. Programming lessons served on a silver plate. For free.

It really is. I have over a decade of programming experience and I still found Chris’ book worth the read.

I learned using this book. It gave me the foundation to branch out with other intro books into C, Objective-C, Rails, etc… I cannot say enough about the approach Pine uses.

Excellent Book! I heartily agree. ‘Code Complete’ by Steve McConnell is an awesome follow-on book after you’re done with ‘Learn to Program.’

This book should be titled “Learn to Program - in Ruby“

One one hand, the book does the job. For the record, I am a seasoned developer and a CS grad. I have used this book to teach my 11 year old Ruby programming and it was a lot of fun. On the other hand, the code teaches a lot of bad habits- mainly it is more procedural then object oriented. More “Perl-ish” than Ruby if you know what I mean. I wish there was a book that also teaches the correct foundations in the first place.

Just bought my 11 year this book, earlier this week. I always recommend this book to anyone that wants to become a programmer and is starting from scratch.

I used this book, but I found that there was a huge gap between what I learned in the book, and accomplishing anything useful. The book ends way to early imo.

This book does help with the basics of variable, arrays, functions, etc. But, it fails at teaching things like OOP, or how to actually do something other than little scripts.