Notes about this preview edition

Update: August 2022

Hi, all! I bet you thought I forgot about this project. Far from it! I really miss working on this book. I have, though, been writing … about MakeCode Arcade, to boot!

You can learn about a course that I wrote with another author at the MakeCode Arcade home page. Scroll down to the Courses section, and you’ll find a new course named Introduction to Computer Science with MakeCode Arcade. The curriculum is available for free on GitHub to verified educators.

The pandemic interrupted my writing schedule, but I’m returning to my personal projects now that we have wrapped up the Microsoft project. This update includes the next chapter on variables and data types. I’ve also added the raw text for a couple of new appendices taken from posts that I’ve made in the MakeCode forums. The outline also reflects two new chapters on debugging.

I recently started using the LaTeX typesetting system, and I have fallen in love with it. I will be taking another pause from adding new content to this book while I convert the existing text to LaTeX. As I do so, I’ll be writing about my journey and the tools that I use in another book. If you’re interested, you can follow my progress here:

https://leanpub.com/latex-tech-pub

That book will be available free of charge on Leanpub. The next preview of this book will be typeset with LaTeX, and the online course should be ready for you to preview, too.

Stay tuned!

This preview edition of Robo Teaches Programming will differ from the final version. Some things to note:

I am using Leanpub to render the preview editions. Final versions will be translated into Bookdown and will use a Tufte-style layout. I also am considering transitioning to MarkDeep to save the translation steps later.
Leanpub does not like nested ordered (i.e., numbered) lists. Hopefully, Bookdown handles those better. :-) MarkDeep certainly does, and I may switch to that, even for rendering the preview editions.
Some images are merely placeholders and will be replaced with appropriately-licensed images. Those images are noted in the text.
Figures, tables, and exercises are mentioned with the generic “Figure/Table/Exercise A-B,” and the actual labels are not printed in the captions. Leanpub does not automate the numbering of figures, tables, and exercises. That will be handled during prepress or in my transition to MarkDeep.
In-text citations and their related references are formatted neither correctly nor consistently. That also will be handled during prepress.
Bibliography is in BibTeX syntax. Appropriate formatting will be handled during prepress.
Link code site has not yet been built. A list of link codes and their URLs is provided at the end of the book for the time being.

As noted at the bottom of most pages, this preview copy is provided for your own, personal use. Do not distribute in whole or in part without express, written consent. © 2019-2023 Robo Technical Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Notes about this preview edition