[Coco] Learning to program

[Robert Gault]

There were some messages on the "best" way to learn programming. On that 
subject was an interesting article "Where's the Real Bottleneck in 
Scientific Computing?" by Gregory V.Wilson which appeared in the Jan. 
American Scientist. To paraphrase, for every successful simulation there 
were dozens of groups struggling to get their programs to run. Many 
struggled on for months or years to achieve better than a crash or a 
divide by zero. Getting to computation heaven was taking much longer 
than expected.

Wilson is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto 
and has placed his course material on the Internet at
http://www.third-bit.com/swc
Much of the material is specific to Python ( similar in many ways to 
Basic09 ) but there are many generally applicable suggestions for any 
computer language. It is well worth browsing through the site.