An analysis of widely used introductory programming textbooks shows that: (1) their size is inordinate; (2) their structure lacks conceptual foundations; (3) their content is a decorated reference manual; (4) their supplementary material (slides and others provided by the publisher) is dictating what we teach and how we teach; (5) they present material that is irrelevant to programming foundations.
And yet, we keep on requiring them in our introductory courses. Have we abdicated our responsibilities?
You have a point in your argumentation. The goal of learning the basics for programming (just the basics like cycles, functions, my first sorting algorithm, etc) is now better achieved through web examples with further modification.
Who hasn't bought a programming book but ended up using google?
The main task for the introductory textbooks is to get to know the syntax format , that is the only thing books can contribute in programming. To learn and understand coding you have to practice, you may make a lot of mistakes , but the errors teach you more than any textbook can (personal experience). If you go through these textbooks, you make just make less syntax errors. As rightly pointed by Cristobal, web examples and tutorials are best way to learn nowadays.
So what do you think about SICP? It's not a small book for sure, but it's not structured about idiosyncracies of a particular language either. I really enjoyed it myself, and I think it makes for an excellent introductory textbook.
I will be teaching a brief introduction to programming soon, so I am interested in that issue.
@Cristobal: Can you explain how you use web examples in a class?
@Peter Scheiblechner: Basically one can take an online tutorial (as pointed by Eric Nunes) and modify it to the class needs. Of course one should give the credits to the original source as always. I think that works good.
edit: After thinking twice, for the case of a teacher i think it is better to generate own examples. And from time to time, use web-based ones.
I think there is a sufficient market to keep these books around. The last book I used --- selected by committee --- had a comment from the author in the preface, which basically said "I only wrote this book because, after so many people asked for it, the publisher paid me to write it."
However, I think there are several books that have come out of work in the CS Education community that are better. (Though there had been disagreement on how to approach OO subjects --- so there are choices.) My experience from using some of these books is that they are not useful past the end of the course, whereas the reference-like texts can age better.
I'm definitely an advocate of a flipped-classroom for intro programming --- where students get "lectured to" outside of class (videos, web-based reading), and do guided work in class. The printed book almost has no role here, since you want to be able to give the student digestible chunks that are relevant to what you are doing in class. I haven't looked but I wouldn't be surprised if someone is providing materials that would fit this purpose.
If authors are just writing textbooks because they were told, then where is the intellectual integrity? For instructors, is it responsible to assign a textbook that is costly, has no pedagogical basis, and is overweight? Moreover, does it make it sense from an educational point of view to let this kind of textbooks dictate the curriculum? Just have a look at the introductory programming textbooks: they are not books, they bulky dictionaries.
@Boumediene --- I could make the argument that from the standpoint of return on investment for a book purchase, a reference like text may be better, because a student could use it long after the course. However, "teaching to the text" with such a book is a terrible idea since it is the craft of programming that has to be taught, and not just the medium of the language. Of course, we could just give the students a language reference, and then use it as a supplement as we teach the craft of programming without a textbook.
@Eric Nunes:
To get to know the syntax id the main task for the introductory textbooks of programming language, but not for programming “an sich”. Students, which start learning programming through learning syntax of some programming language, have later problems design more complicated programs. When they should solve a complex problem, they start with thinking, how to code it and not how to design it. We should first teach them how to design programs (and let some code generator to code these programs) and when they will have basic architectonic principles under the skin, we can show them, how the designed programs were coded and teach them, how to code programs, which are behind the abilities of the nowadays code generators.
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