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There are so many things in this book that have stuck with me that if I were to cover them all I fear that you wouldn’t buy the book and read it for yourself. One of the things that has stuck with me is the differences in the way that the Greeks and the Jews thought and continue to think. This sets up the whole book, in that you are prepared to see things like a Greek (wanting to see something new and/or fresh) through seeing like a Jew (someone who would have been immersed in the Old Testament scriptures from an early age and values repetition and making sure to get things right over learning something new).

There were some things in the book that just blew me away because I’d never considered it before– such as the parallels between Moses coming down with the Ten Commandments and what happened on the Day of Pentecost. There were some that I were more familiar with, but enjoyed reading again– like talking about how a young Hebrew man went about getting a wife.

If your “diet” of the Bible reading and teaching is heavy on the New Testament, this book would open your eyes to just how much of the New Testament is a fulfillment of the Old. Even if you are getting a balanced “diet” of Old and New Testament, you will find that the sections of this book that talk about how a Hebrew child would memorize the complete Torah, or how much these people had Scripture as part of their daily lives to be challenging and convicting. I’ve found that it has made me want to memorize more Scripture and think through what’s going on in the New Testament stories that are very familiar to the believer that has been in church all his life!

I received a pre-release copy of this book in return for a review. The review contents are my own.

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I must type “SELECT * FROM …..” hundreds of times a day. Would it be more efficient to specify the columns or save the SQL so that I don’t have to keep typing it over and over again? Probably. However, in my brain, typing is really fast– probably faster than navigating to the folder to try to find the snippet of code. So I end up typing it over again.

The SELECT command (and I almost always type this in all caps) performs the operation of finding the data from the table or groups of tables that you’re interested in. SQL follows English in many ways, such that what you’re going to enter into the database for a command is something like…Continue reading

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I think I’ve been brainwashed by movies to think that imparting knowledge to the next generation can take place during a 5 minute montage where they go from knowing nothing about coding to being proficient enough to make a difference. At least, that’s the movie that was playing in my head leading up to my first attempt to sit down with them. I bet musicians and other professionals see things the same way when they think about getting their children doing something with them. No one envisions the years of work, the motivation, and the general pain that it takes to put in the time to get to the point where they are in their career. I mean, we were all naturals, right?Continue reading

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Teaching kids how to program should be similar to teaching them English or a different language. I stress should. As any programmer knows, while what we do could be boiled down to a few concepts like typing, syntax, grammar, and whatnot, the reality is what really makes us be able to function well as programmers or developers is the ability to see a problem, break it up into its components and steps and then express those things in a language that a computer through a compiler can understand. Through this, we also do pattern matching, logical analysis, and we find ways to make things that we can reuse to the point that it makes us seem lazy– which we like to label efficient.

So how do you take knowledge that has been learned over time, perfected through multiple mistakes, and something that more often than not works with something that already exists and bring a kid up to speed? I’m sure there’s multiple different answers, and I could certainly buy some book(s) and evaluate it. I could do like my grandfather was taught to swim– by getting thrown into the deep end. Or I could try to bring them along on a new project that has multiple different opportunities to grow in different ways and see how that works.

And then I got the thought, why not try to document it here? Much of teaching programming is searching out answers and I could certainly write up things to do to learn different things. Maybe get help from other devs should they be looking for something similar. Or maybe just to keep record, because there’s probably many people that have tried this!

In any case, my project is going to start in SQL, and then go off into C# and PHP and who knows where else. So, it won’t hurt to have documentation somewhere, and I can at least express my design this way, so why not?

New series in programming, here we come!

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The presentation of your website can attract or repel your audience.  To that end, I’m always out looking at new templates to see if I like the features of something new.  Here are 50 beautiful WordPress themes— though some may have gone stale.  Take a peak and see if you’d like to “wear” something new!