Teaching programming: two approaches

Hi!

Just as there are two types of programmers (career and geek programmers), there are two approaches to teaching programming:

1. The first approach (I call it career teaching) dominates the teaching industry. It concentrates on programming languages, technology, frameworks and development tools. It will teach you the difference between Struts and JSF and how to use them in a Sun Java System Web Server or something like that. It is usually a boring, vendor-specific and narrow-thinking study; it is what most practitioners want and pay for.
   
2. The second approach teaches you formal thinking instead of adopting a technology. This approach is often based on problem solving, because as long as you are faced a formal problem, the programming languages and technology do not matter. There is no common framework to find an optimal placement of rooks on a chessboard so that the sum of numbers in squares are minimized.

To be a true engineer, one must go through both types of learning. Although there is a lot of material, books and courses for the career learning, there is only few books that will teach you formal thinking. One of them is the book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay, which is available both as hard copy and for download. Another resource is the Book of Programming Problems by me, not as splendid as the former, but its a start!

Honestly, it is not a book at all, and it does not match David MacKay's masterpiece even distantly, but it is rather a collection of programming problems with different level of complexity, all with solutions. You are welcome to propose your problems and discuss solutions (you can leave comments under each problem).

Microsoft Word plotting utility

Hi all!

There is my free function plotting macros for MS Word 2007. Take a look. It is capable of building function graphs and other curves right in the Word document. The plot itself is just a Word object, so that you can move the document from one computer to another, format or change the plot lines, change everything using MS Word tools.