I have more thanks for your interest and more apologies for this book's deficiencies than I can enumerate. My motivation for writing this book comes from a gap I saw in today's literature for kids interested in learning to program. I started programming when I was 9 years old in the BASIC language with a book similar to this one. During the course of writing this, I've realized how a modern language like Python has made programming far easier and versatile. Python has a gentle learning curve while still being a serious language that is used by programmers professionally.
The current crop of programming books for kids that I've seen fell into two categories. First, books that did not teach programming so much as "game creation software" or in dumbed down languages to make programming "easy". Or second, they taught programming like a mathematics textbook: all principles and concepts with little application left to the reader. This book takes a different approach: show the game source code right up front and explain programming principles from the examples.
I have also made this book available under the Creative Commons license, which allows you to make copies and distribute this book (or excerpts) with my full permission, as long as attribution to me is left intact and it is used for noncommercial purposes. (See the copyright page.) I want to make this book a gift to a world that has given me so much. Thank you again for reading this book, and feel free to email me any questions or comments.
Al Sweigart
al@inventwithpython.com
The full text of this book is available in HTML or PDF format at:
http://inventwithpython.com