Is it compatible for any beginner, not just for kids?

[Durim Kryeziu]

Hi Bryson,

Welcome to Ranch and thanks for being here and promoting your book!

I'm very interested for my wife to learn programming, she graduated in Economics, but now both of us are interested for her to start with programming.
She started to learn some HTML & CSS stuff, but I'm interested in a good book that explain things very well for beginners.
I don't know much about Python, can she program for web with Python? Is this book a good start for someone like her that wants to focus on web programming? Would you prefer Python to her?


Thanks in advance

[Bryson Payne]

Durim,
Thank you for your question - yes, Teach Your Kids to Code is written for adults and kids alike, with a focus on beginners. My father-in-law is 76 years old and teaching himself Python using my book (he was one of my first readers), and I've gotten great reviews and feedback from parents and other adults that the visual approach and short programs are non-threatening and clear enough that "even a parent" can learn to code .
As for web programming, it's more common that Python would run on the server - Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services let you program cloud-based apps in Python. If she's looking for front-end web development, HTML and JavaScript are good starting points, but if she's interested in server-side programming, Python is powerful enough to run YouTube's servers ( https://www.python.org/about/quotes/ ), and it's clean and beginner-friendly, too.
It's great to be on the Ranch this week, and best wishes to you and your wife, whichever programming language she tackles first. The book site has a sample chapter at http://nostarch.com/teachkids, and all my source code files are free to download, feel free to have her give it a try, and let me know if I can be of help.
Sincerely,
Bryson

[chris webster]

As discussed elsewhere, Python is a great language for anybody who wants to learn to code, and it is widely used in programming classes and other learning materials e.g. free online courses on programming, computer science, data science etc with Coursera, Udacity, EdX etc. So any Python you learn here will provide a useful foundation for a whole range of other learning opportunities if you want to take it further.