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Nice. Thanks for sharing.

Bravo for burrito recipe. I'm convinced I became a programmer in 4th grade. Our creative writing assignment was instructions for making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. Then our teacher followed our instructions literally. Hilarity ensued.

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I think the Intro's link to the local env setup in the appendix is broken.

Anymore, I always check the colophon first, then decide to proceed.

I applaud the online option.

I'm dubious of the local option. "Install the latest XYZ" will bite you (your students). Especially with JavaScript and nodejs. Mayflies live longer.

For future, should tutorials start with Docker images, or scripts, or virtualbox images, or something, to mitigate digital drift? Hoping other commenters will share their ideas, experiences.

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> Our creative writing assignment was instructions for making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. Then our teacher followed our instructions literally.

Did something very similar at an IBM day camp where we did the same thing :) I was 12 when I attended. I distinctly remember the epiphany I had after the sandwich lesson.

On one of the other days we did Lego MindStorm stuff. I was randomly assigned to the "software" team. They gave us a little workbook/journal with questions for us to reflect on the daily activities. One of the questions for that day was what we liked best. I wrote something very similar to "programming because that's what I want to do when I grow up" (I had decided that then and there). I am a software developer now and that workbook is one of my prized possessions.

> Our creative writing assignment was instructions for making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich

The Harvard CS50 class uses this as an example as well - with mixed results that are hilarious, but relatively obvious once you start thinking about coding and recipes.

Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euFj8D1A1Kw

Re: nodeJS versions, I'd go with something like "Install NodeJS, this book was written with version x.y.z"; I don't think JS will become backwards incompatible in the near future, so as long as the book doesn't contain experimental or unofficial JS features, it should be fine for the next 5-10 years.

Anecdotal I suppose, but I have an app that was written for node 5 and it doesn't work on 6+. I'm sure I could figure out and upgrade it, but it's not too high on the priorities yet thanks to nvm. Oh, and it's not the code, it's one or more of the npm modules.

Odds are that it is a native module. That's unfortunate, but there is a plan in place to make a consistent native module API: https://github.com/nodejs/abi-stable-node

For digital drift: anything content-addressable (e.g. using git and referencing SHAs) is your answer. Continued availability and support, though? If you can answer that question, you should probably quit your current job and use your divination talents in more profitable fields.

I used the Peanut Butter and Jelly one in my classes when I taught programming. I also used "tying shoes". Both of those examples came from a class I took on how to teach general subjects. Before you can teach someone, you need to be able to explain it well. Thus, before you can tell a computer to do it, the same applies.

> I think the Intro's link to the local env setup in the appendix is broken.

The book is written using Leanpub's markdown syntactic sugar it seems.

Side note: That teacher's method is great! That's a hell of a way to have kids remember what you taught them.

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