I see a couple of recommendations for textbooks now... thanks.
As to why I think one style is good or bad-- probably the same reasons
any of you prefer yours + in my experience, the style that I have
adopted is the easiest for the beginners to understand and not be
confused by. This list (naturally) underestimates how hard it is for
non-techie, non naturally tech-inclined newbies to approach language
syntax. The quotation thing is a good example-- they are taught about
interpolation and trying to learn about quotation marks and escaping
and when each is appropriate, then they are shown code like:
echo substr("abcdef", 1);
So they naturally want to know-- why the double quotes? And there's no
good logical reason for double quotes in the example-- and there are
languages where the function could take a variable to be interpolated
that DOES need double quotes-- so it is very confusing to them.
If I CAN, I would like to avoid that confusion so *I* Can teach them
about the differences.
Similarly my preference and teaching that they keep variables out of
quotes-- it's a style thing, something I consider good practice,
something I see most code examples I find use, so if I could find a
text that did it, that would be great. For that matter, even a text
that didn't do it but was CONSISTENT. It's amazing how many books are
totally inconsistent. These students aren't at a level where
inconsistency is the best approach to stimulating their learning. They
get there, but it takes a while.
c
--
Chris Lott
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