Programming for the Puzzled: Learn to Program While Solving Puzzles (Mit Press)

This was not a large book. Some of the puzzle contents were interesting. But I found the that solving the puzzles was sometimes difficult, if not impossible on my own. Hard to follow some of the more advanced techniques for puzzle solving.

Great book. Loved the detail. Used it along with the YouTube series offered by MIT.

This book was a delight to read, showed me how to think about solving puzzles, and secretly helped sharpen my programming skills. I know how to "program" in Python from following tutorials but I don't know how to really program in Python. Many of the puzzles are familiar to anyone who likes puzzles, but the simplicity and elegance of the solutions is what kept my attention. The code was so clear and directly mirrored the English explanation that it did not feel like code. It reminded me of the first time I felt like I knew a foreign language when I haggled with a salesman in a foreign country.My favorite chapters were "You can read minds" and "You won't want to play Suduko again" It was fun to see how the magician does the trick and I was so satisfied with myself that I could follow the well explained code. The code was almost as magic as the trick itself. The Suduko chapter did ruin the game for me -- now that I know how to write a program to solve it, there is no challenge in doing it with a pencil. That is not so bad, because now I like puzzles that require some insight.After reading the book, it is surprising to see how many computer science principles are covered. Each chapter starts by stating the paradigms covered but I did not pay attention to that. It was only after reading most of the book, did I go back and see how much was covered and it felt like more than I would have learned in a whole semester's course.

I looked at many programming books, trying to find a book to use for teaching programming to my son. This book has a couple of unique characteristics that I really like.Most programming books I've seen before focus on teaching syntax of a programming language. It's like learning a grammar and vocabulary when you learn a new language such as Spanish, French, and others. But just knowing a language doesn't really make you a good speaker or writer. In a similar way, I don't usually find typical programming books that teach syntax to be that helpful in learning how to write a good computer program.This book is different. The book seems to focus more on teaching how to think as a programmer than just teaching syntax. Each chapter starts with a problem, describing a puzzle, then discusses how to solve the puzzle by developing a systematic strategy (algorithm) that can turn into step-by-step instructions that computers can run. Once the strategy is developed, the book shows how that can be written as a computer program in Python and can be improved through optimizations. In a sense, this book walks through a process that you need to go through as a programmer and teaches how to solve a problem by writing a program. I think this will be useful for programming in any language.I also love that this book starts immediately with solving a puzzle. I was writing a program to solve an interesting problem from the first chapter rather than having to read through many chapters to learn program syntax before writing something interesting. Each chapter is also quite short. So I could read and finish a puzzle without spending a huge amount of time. Overall, the book was much more interesting and easier to go through compared to other programming books.This book doesn't really describe basic mechanical steps for writing Python programs such as how to download and install Python, how to write and save programs, how to run them, etc. This was not an issue for me because I already had other programming experiences. But if you haven't written a program at all, I think it will be useful to have another traditional programming book as a reference.