Help me become a better programming instructor.

March 11, 2008 11:05 AM

TeachFilter: Help me become a better programming instructor.

I teach the following technologies at a college level:

- XML (basics, DTDs, schemas, XSLT, DOM)
- Mobile Programming (J2ME, Mobile Web)
- Ruby and Ruby on Rails
- Server Side Computing with PHP & MySQL

I am looking for two types of book recommendations for each of these subjects:

- Textbooks that students will enjoy (and will find useful enough to keep after graduation).
- Advanced or "best practice" books to enhance my knowledge of these subjects (making me a better resource for my students).

Your help is much appreciated.

posted by stungeye to education (4 answers total)

As a beginning programmer...learning Ruby, I have to recommend "Ruby by Example" by Kevin Baird. The Poignant guides are also pretty entertaining.

I am a very visual/conceptual/tactile learner... so trying to learn programming has not come easy to me. I was about to give up finding a textbook/language that would work from me, until someone recommended www.processing.org . Incredible. I went out and bought the book, the "Foreward" and "Preface" should be required reading for any programming teacher. Its the first programming language I've sat down to where I almost immediately have 10+ different ideas for projects.
posted by jmnugent at 11:29 AM on March 11, 2008

Effective XML is a wonderful best practices book for XML. The author has several other books on XML as well although some are older and thus more out of date.
posted by mmascolino at 11:30 AM on March 11, 2008

My coworker and I have been using Beginning PHP and MySQL to teach our selves, well, PHP and MySQL. It's a wonderful, practical book with clear prose and a plenty of example code to back it up. We have a few books to work with, including ones from O'Reilly, but this is by far the best one.
posted by Alison at 11:43 AM on March 11, 2008

jmnugent: I'm a huge fan of Processing.

You should check out Shoes, a graphics/windowing toolkit for Ruby that borrows many ideas from Processing/NodeBox.

mmascolino: A co-worker also recommend Effective XML so I'll pick it up asap.
posted by stungeye at 11:51 AM on March 11, 2008