Texts on fundamentals of programming/computer science

[Greg Skinner]

In article <28226 at apple.Apple.COM> desnoyer at Apple.COM (Peter Desnoyers) writes:
>The approach to problem sets in the [Scheme] class at MIT was great
>- they would give you lots of code and you would then have to figure
>it out and then modify or extend it. Much more of a real-world
>approach than writing everything from scratch. 

I took this class before the book was written (the book was derived
from the course handouts) and I co-taught a three week seminar on it
once.

While what you say is true (much real-world programming consists of
modifying large software projects) I question whether this is a good
thing to teach as a first undergraduate computer science requirement.
During the time I took the course, I tended to get lost in the huge
pieces of software because I had no framework for debugging (let alone
understanding) a large piece of software.  I know other people that
had this problem.  (In general, I found that students spent much more
time on the subject than was allocated by the department.)  I found my
understanding of how to write software increased once I had actually
written large pieces of software and then started to modify them.
(The software engineering course at MIT, 6.170, is much better in this
regard.)

This is just my opinion, though.  I know lots of people that loved
6.001 and really got a lot out of it, but I and others were lost most
of the time.  I've found it's easier to give the students software
projects of increasing sizes to design on their own to give them a
feel for the size and complexity of software projects.

--gregbo