Every now and then you come across a book that is special.
A couple that I remember are 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman for its high level of abstraction over petty details and its breath of subjects, 'The Little Schemer' by Daniel Friedman for its mind blowing Q&A style introduction to recursive thinking or 'The Connection Machine' by Danny Hillis, a doctoral thesis that read like a science fiction novel.
Closer to Pharo, 'Smalltalk Best Practice Patters' by Kent Beck surprises by being deceptively simple yet profound and by transcending the language for general object design principles. 'A Mentoring Course on Smalltalk' by Andres Valloud manages to bring across very advanced ideas mostly by discussing the implementation of one or two relatively simple problems.
So what about a (children's) book about computer science without any (pseudo) code or math ? And make it fun too, please.
'Lauren Ipsum' by Carlos Bueno and Ytaelena Lopez [
http://www.laurenipsum.org ] does just that.
It is a story about a girl that is lost in some magic land and wants to get home. Along the way the fundamental principles of computer science get woven into the story - as if they were the most normal thing in the world (which they are).
I was smiling all the time, for all the little jokes and references, although many of those will be lost on those that are not computer nerds. Graph searching, reader writer problems, abstraction, heuristics, networking, communication and so on are all part of the story. Beautiful.
I read the e-book version in iBooks on my iPhone without any layout problems.
Recommended.
Sven
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Sven Van Caekenberghe
Proudly supporting Pharo
http://pharo.orghttp://association.pharo.orghttp://consortium.pharo.org
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