Young Rewired State, Get Coding! Learn HTML, CCS, and JavaScript and Build a Website, App, and Game, Walker Books Australia, 1 August 2016, 207pp., $16.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781406366846
Ever wanted to learn computer coding? This book offers comprehensive information about using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build websites, web-based apps and web-based games. Divided into six colour-coded chapters (or missions), with a few pages of introduction on the history of computer programming and key coding skills, the reader works their way through essential skills around building a web page, creating passwords with JavaScript, building an app, planning routes to add information from another webpage, and building a game. The missions are based around a narrative where readers keep the Monk Diamond safe from the Bond Brothers, assisting the explorer Professor Harry Bairstone, Dr Ruby Day and Mr Volkov.
Get Coding was put together by Young Rewired State, a ‘worldwide community of digital makers aged 18 and under’. It has a contemporary feel with thick, colourful, friendly pages studded with illustrations of the main characters (including Ernest the dog), extracts from Professor Bairstone’s fact file and encyclopaedia, tags and code words, checklists and DIY tasks to check that the coding is correct. The end information is about Young Rewired State and links readers to ongoing material about the coding community. If you know someone with an affinity for computers, this book would be a wonderful introduction to computer programming. It’s designed specifically for younger coders, and is much cheaper than a coding textbook. Highly recommended.
Reviewed by Pam Harvey
