
Ask HN: Programming books for teaching beginners - Bootvis
I will be teaching some programming to an absolute beginner and am wondering what HN thinks is a good book for absolute beginners. So please share your thoughts.<p>I&#x27;m considering starting with &#x27;Learn Pyhton the Hard Way&#x27;.<p>Some background:<p>She has some experience maintaining and setting up WordPress websites but I would say it is fairly limited.<p>I&#x27;m looking to teach fundamentals more than making her ready for a job although that would be welcome in the long run. So, gaining some understanding or being able to pivot to PHP and&#x2F;or JavaScript is never a bad thing in this job market (Amsterdam).
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PaulHoule
How old? What sort of things does this person want to program?

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Bootvis
29 years old. We don’t have a goal yet so I’m sticking to fundamentals.

She has a degree in Communications so something web-related might be
interesting.

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Cozumel
Maybe teach her how to make a Wordpress plugin? It'd slot in with what she
already knows and she'd see immediate benefit as well as a real life
application of her code.

Learn Python the hard way is a great idea too though, I got my friend started
with the Ruby one and she really took to it. Another good one for Python is
[http://automatetheboringstuff.com/](http://automatetheboringstuff.com/)

Something to watch out for though is a lot of books are hopelessly out of
date, code moves so fast that all the code examples in a book even just a
couple of months old will be broken. Trivial for experienced people to
workaround but typically if you're reading the book to learn you won't be able
to figure it out.

