Picturing Programs:
an Introduction to Computer Programming

© Stephen Bloch 2010

Philosophy	Pictures used in the textbook	Download the textbook	Worked Exercises from the textbook	Gallery of student work	Errata

Picturing Programs is a textbook for beginning computer programming, published in August 2010 by College Publications (not to be confused with College Publishing). The ISBN is 978-1-84890-015-8. We've tried very hard to keep the price down, so it lists at GBP 18.50, which as of this writing is around $29.30. Pre-publication drafts of it have already been used by dozens of high school and college teachers in several countries.

To download for free...

As of June 9, 2011, you can download the entire book for free. Once you've started reading it and working through it, you can pay me whatever you think it's worth.

To order the printed book...

Instructors using the book should contact the author for an instructor's guide (which is still under construction, but contains a bunch of helpful teaching tips).

Site contents

This site will host errata, updates, supporting classroom materials, problem solutions, and so on.

In the meantime, try the following links:

• testimonials from past users of our approach
• teachpacks to accompany this book
• the Program By Design Project (formerly known as the the TeachScheme!, ReachJava Project), which offers summer workshops training high school and college faculty in our approach (whether or not you decide to use my textbook).
• How to Design Programs, another book that inspired mine (available for free download from the Web)
• The unfinished second edition of How to Design Programs (see above)
• the software used in the book (also available for free download from the Web)
• the author's web site at Adelphi University
• the author's "Computer Programming for Non-Majors" course

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0618543. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).