appendix contributions the class was too high andeven for students who succeededthe overall level of achievement was too low one of the problems saw was the books they were too bigwith too much unnecessary detail about javaand not enough high-level guidance about how to program and they all suffered from the trap door effectthey would start out easyproceed graduallyand then somewhere around the bottom would fall out the students would get too much new materialtoo fastand would spend the rest of the semester picking up the pieces two weeks before the first day of classesi decided to write my own book my goals werekeep it short it is better for students to read pages than not read pages be careful with vocabulary tried to minimize the jargon and define each term at first use build gradually to avoid trap doorsi took the most difficult topics and split them into series of small steps focus on programmingnot the programming language included the minimum useful subset of java and left out the rest needed titleso on whim chose how to think like computer scientist my first version was roughbut it worked students did the readingand they understood enough that could spend class time on the hard topicsthe interesting topics and (most importantletting the students practice released the book under the gnu free documentation licensewhich allows users to copymodifyand distribute the book what happened next is the cool part jeff elknera high school teacher in virginiaadopted my book and translated it into python he sent me copy of his translationand had the unusual experience of learning python by reading my own book jeff and revised the bookincorporated case study by chris meyersand in we released how to think like computer scientistlearning with pythonalso under the gnu free documentation license as green tea pressi published the book and started selling hard copies through amazon com and college book stores other books from green tea press are available at greenteapress com in started teaching at olin college and got to teach python for the first time the contrast with java was striking students struggled lesslearned moreworked on more interesting projectsand generally had lot more fun over the last five years have continued to develop the bookcorrecting errorsimproving some of the examples and adding materialespecially exercises in started work on major revision--at the same timei was contacted by an editor at cambridge university press who was interested in publishing the next edition good timingi hope you enjoy working with this bookand that it helps you learn to program and thinkat least little bitlike computer scientist