#000590
Learn to Program
Chris Pine
A famously gentle on-ramp to writing code, aimed squarely at people who have never programmed and assume they can't. Chris Pine teaches through the Ruby language, starting with one-line programs — printing a name, computing an age in seconds — and building step by step toward real, structured programs, all in a light, encouraging, wisecracking voice that keeps the intimidation low. It grew out of an online tutorial Pine wrote while teaching programming to kids, and that classroom warmth survives on the page. Because Ruby reads almost like English, beginners spend their energy learning to think like a programmer rather than fighting syntax. Decades on, it remains a widely recommended first book for absolute newcomers, valued more for building confidence and habits of mind than for exhaustive language coverage.
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The author
Chris Pine discovered Ruby in the early 2000s while building tools for a games-programming job, and later volunteered teaching programming to gifted children — the experience that produced this book. He writes as a patient teacher rather than a systems guru, which is much of the book's charm.
The book
Learn to Program began as a free online tutorial and was published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, with a widely used Second Edition (2009) updated to modern Ruby. It moves from tiny scripts to structured programs, and the second edition adds exercise answers in two flavors: a beginner's solution and "how Chris Pine would do it."
How it has aged
The pedagogy holds up beautifully; the specifics show their age, since Ruby has moved on and the wider job market now leans toward Python and JavaScript for first languages. As a confidence-building introduction to programming thinking, it remains a strong recommendation.
For more context
Pine keeps the original tutorial online, and the Pragmatic Bookshelf page documents the editions.
Sources - Learn to Program, 2nd Edition — Pragmatic Bookshelf - Learn to Program — Chris Pine
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Chris Pine
- Publisher
- Pragmatic Bookshelf
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Craft & How-to
- Location
- Colorado