I second this. For anyone trying to teach computers (and anything else), this will save you from repeating all the mistakes that all the other computer programming education startups are making/will make in the future.
Again, just to be clear, this book is really really really really important.
Mindstorms? I did a quick google and there are assorted books with that title (after you filer out "lego"). None seemed to be relevant to this discussion.
I'm not logging in with Facebook to see your site, about which I know nothing, when you haven't even sold me on its relevance to the topic under discussion.
I was following a URL that apparently was supposed to go to a specific subpage, not to the site homepage. And apparently there was a loginwall in front of that subpage. What good would clicking around the site have done?
If you think I was going to read all the pages I could access on the site, so that I could ascertain whether it was worth my while to log in, then you grossly overestimate my commitment to a poorly-explained link I clicked speculatively in a comment.
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This looks great guys! I especially like the tutorial flow.
Some criticism:
You should show JS syntax errors instead just showing a generic error message. I understand you don't want to scare newbies away with compiler errors, but your solution just makes debugging more difficult.
You should show syntax errors, but translate the default JS error messages into something friendlier. Codecademy does this for their intro lessons.
That Heroku video you link to on the Dev Tools page is about 4 years old, and is demoing a version of the product that no longer exists (their attempt at an online IDE of sorts).
I don't understand why we cant skip around the lessons in the python tutorial. I don't need to start at lesson 1; i want to skip around to different lessons.
I get it. It's just that I'm not a beginning programmer. I mean, unless the site is only for novices with zero programming skill, you're requiring all intermediate programmers to relearn stuff they've already mastered.
Also, I wanted to browse around the lessons in order to evaluate the quality of the site so that I could decide whether to recommend the site to non-programmer friends.
That should have been the first thing you said. :)
But such tutorials are obviously for rank beginners, experienced programmers don't use these kinds of sites. Unless it's a dramatic jump, like from COBOL to Haskell, to learn a new language they go straight to the language's documentation: