> I guess "play games instead of reading books" idea attracts audience with low motivation?
This seems a little uncharitable in its premise to me. I've never had all that much success learning from programming books, and the success I've had seemed to happen mostly when I would take the examples and run them and pull them apart and break them and fix them (etc, etc, etc).
From the other side, well designed games are remarkable in their ability to teach concepts to a player (even if, in the general case, they're not concepts with applicability outside the game).
It seems obvious to me that some kind of interactivity is really helpful in learning. Not too much of a stretch from there to guess that the best form of programming education might be some kind of game/book hybrid.
This seems a little uncharitable in its premise to me. I've never had all that much success learning from programming books, and the success I've had seemed to happen mostly when I would take the examples and run them and pull them apart and break them and fix them (etc, etc, etc).
From the other side, well designed games are remarkable in their ability to teach concepts to a player (even if, in the general case, they're not concepts with applicability outside the game).
It seems obvious to me that some kind of interactivity is really helpful in learning. Not too much of a stretch from there to guess that the best form of programming education might be some kind of game/book hybrid.