Studying Programming in Prison?

Hello brothers and sisters! I have a question for you and if you answer, I will be very happy. My brother has been in a prison in Türkiye. Nowadays he’s studying programming, especially Phyton and Internet Programming (Javascript, HTML, CSS). He finished Pearson’s Phyton book and same other books. They don’t give him PC of course, so he write all codes on his notebook when he do exercises. What are your suggesstions for him, which books are good for him or have you any code examples that he can understand? For example can he do little projects on paper and check his codes with answers? Hace you any little projects or exercises like that? He want to improve his skills in this field, so when he get his freedom he maybe can find a job or something :slight_smile: I’m looking for your suggestions for him. Thank you my friends. :slight_smile:

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Well programming is a very interactive process. You can write code and put it all on paper but until you actually run it on a computer to catch errors, you can only assume that the code is right.

As for books, he can certainly get any book that is probably a textbook. Textbooks are used to teach programming and often have end of chapter questions, problems and then the solutions in the back.

One thing good about most programming books is that they also can propose a scenario, will then show some code to solve it and talk about the solution. If he can identify that an example is coming in the text, he could stop, try to do it on paper and then continue reading to compare his answer to the snippet they show.

But this is only going to be for small snippets that show how to use a function or class or whatever and not usually full fledge programs which teach you much more.

Can you send him material? Maybe print some stuff from online (full source code), run some solutions and print the results as well. Then ask him to debug it. Or have him write some programs, you type it in and run it and give him the results. That would take much longer to do, but at least it would be some feedback on full programs he is writing.

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In this context a notebook can mean paper and it can mean a computer that is the equivalent of a PC. I will assume you mean paper.

I began programming half a century ago. Back then we often got just two chances a day to test our programs. Extremely different from now when we can execute many tests in a minute. If a person is limited to just one test a day or less frequently then it can be very challenging. I have no suggestions but I want to say it is good that he is trying to spend his time in a productive manner.

It is unfortunate that they do not provide access to a computer part of the time. They should be trying to teach him useful skills. And if he has access to a browser and a connection to the internet then there are many online IDEs that can be used.

Your brother’s determination to learn programming in prison is admirable!

Books to Consider:

  • Python: “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” and “Python Crash Course”
  • JavaScript: “Eloquent JavaScript”
  • HTML/CSS: “HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites”