Coding Games in Python (DK Help Your Kids)

I was almost put off this book by some of the reviews, but I'm glad to say I bought it in the end and my 7yr old really enjoyed it. I can honestly say that we found the book, complete, enjoyable, and engaging.We particularly like the 'Hacks and tweaks' sections at the end of each project. This encourages the child to not just blindly follow the code the book provides, but rather encourages the child to think for themselves.The use of the pygame module also means the children can make far more colourful and engaging games than are covered in Ursborne's "Coding for Beginners: Using Python"

I've been going through this with my 10 year old son. He is really enjoying it. The games are a fun way to learn the basics of programming and get progressively more complex at the book goes on. I like that at the end of each chapter there are a number of suggestions to customize the games. This challenges you to try some things on your own, rather than simply sticking to the code listings. It takes you from someone that can copy out of a book to someone that can actually write software on your own.As with most programming tutorials the hardest part is getting the development environment set up in the first place. This can often be a challenge. It involves downloading and installing multiple things from the internet. It can be important to find a set of versions that work together otherwise you get odd errors. Versions of these things change far too often for a book to be up to date. I had some trouble getting pygame zero (which this book is based on) working as it had not been updated to support the latest version of python. Installing the previous version of python sorted that out, but it was not obvious from the error messages that this was the issue.Fortunately all the installing is done in the first chapter and after that the rest of the book works well and can be done without an internet connection. If you are going to give this to a child, I would recommend sitting down without them and getting the first chapter completed before leaving them with the rest of the book.

I am sorry but the python code in this book is simply incomplete. The package doesn't seem to be well defined and additional code is required in the script. If you are buying it for a beginner/kid they may get very frustrated before they work through the issues.My advice is to buy the Usborne book coding for beginners using python. It is far more educational and uses codes that works!

Great reference book, well written - my 14 year old thinks it's fab