programming & excercises books

[kartabosh]

does anyone know any books on programming that are good? (especially beginner books)

i've already read "learn to program" by Chris Pine and i didn't really find out many new things, i did find some nice tricks but that's about it
i tried to look into k&r but i got confused very fast

also i would like to know if anyone knows any books or websites with short programs for beginners (like do a normal expresion to rpn converter and small stuff like that that would make a total beginner understand programming and better himself)

[s.fox]

Hello,

Which language are you looking to learn? :)

-Silver Fox

[Some Penguin]

*shrug*

You could try Perl. e.g. http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/

You can write pretty uncomplicated programs in a pretty uncomplicated style (less syntactical overhead than, say, Java), but it provides much more built-in-to-language stuff than C, which means that there's a fair bit of stuff you won't need to mess with (at least at first), and you'll spend less time trying to remember which functions are declared in which header files or which are POSIX vs. C standard vs. whatever. And it's an extremely TMTOWTDI language.

Perl also has an extremely powerful support for regular expressions and extensions thereof, which is handy for writing tokenizers and the like. There's libpcre for a reason.

You just need to make sure that the code you're reading was written by people who actually cared about readability, because it is quite possible to write absolutely horrific (in terms of legibility, anyway) but correctly functional Perl. :P

[trent.josephsen]

For beginning programmers, I usually recommend Learning Python or Learning Perl. I prefer Python as a first language, but the Perl book is IMO a better introduction to programming in general. My $.02...

[ja660k]

also, dont use books...
because they age... especially books on perl, php python
perl 5.8 came out in 2002, and 5.10 was released in 2007, so languages move at a fast pace, and if your not up youll be writing discontinued code. I know that in perl 5.8 there is several ways of writing object oriented-ness in perl, in perl 6, they are only having one way...

i suggest getting some good tutorials online... look at
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=333867

for a bunch of user submitted tutorials on many different languages.