Kudos have to go to Joe Ehrensberger for translating “Snake Wrangling for Kids” into German.

The completed edition of Schlangengerangel für Kinder was just released today. PDFs for Windows, Linux and Mac versions can be downloaded from the Google Code site (this link will take you directly to the downloads).

Au ja!

This is cool – SWFK was the top voted comment (option?) on a recent stack overflow discussion about programming for 11 year olds:
stackoverflow.com/…/which-programming-language-is-manageable-by-an-11-year-old-kid

There’s finally a German version in progress:
code.google.com/p/swfk-de/

Here’s a news group discussion about SWFK being used (at least in part) for a course on teaching Python:
archives.seul.org/schoolforge/…/msg00041.html

And finally, the book also made the list of beginner’s tools on the sugarlabs wiki:
wiki.sugarlabs.org/…/Resources

Chuffed.

I was updating the SWFK project page with the total number of downloads (since I last updated it in March), and discovered that I’ve miscalculated the figure. I use awstats for my site, and usually just go through all the swfk-*.zip links for each month, using a calculator, to work out the sub-total, then add the downloads from the Google Code project page. However, this time I used a spreadsheet, and it appears as if I’ve previously missed a few thousand downloads. So while I thought the the grand total was around 16K, it looks like it’s actually in the region of 19K. Which is something like 18-20GB worth of data — a reasonably impressive figure, when I think about it.

Perhaps I’ll throw myself a party when I hit 20K…

…or “Snake Wrangling for Kids in Spanish”, has just been released. Well done to José for getting it finished.

Download from the Google project page: http://code.google.com/p/swfk-es

Muy bueno! (I hope that’s right… )

That’s Snake Wrangling for Kids, in French for the linguistically challenged.

Congratulations to Michel for releasing the first non-English edition of SWFK. Awesome effort!
See the project downloads for version 0.0.1.

Spanish edition soon to follow (at least judging from the commits)…

“Snake Wrangling for Kids” is now hosted at Google Code. This includes the Mercurial repository, with all image files (including the cover, which I felt was too large for my repo, but should be fine supported by Google’s BigTable… ).

Check out the new project page here: http://code.google.com/p/swfk.

If you’re a regular visitor, you may have noticed my rather ill-fated attempt (IMO) at using a magazine style theme on this site has now been replaced by… well… very little theme at all.

This is not the only change. After much internal cogitation, I’ve decided to dump the forum, and use Google Groups for further discussion on all my projects. Along with moving the hosting of those projects elsewhere. In short, this blog now becomes more of a blog. The distinction makes sense in my head anyway.

While the old forum messages can still be found here: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/forum, check below for where you should submit comments from now on.

YAK for WordPress
The main project page will now be at WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yak-for-wordpress/.
General discussion will now be held at: http://groups.google.com/group/yak-discuss.
Bug reports can be posted to: http://groups.google.com/group/yak-bugs.

stomp.py
The main project page is at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/stomppy/.
The discussion group can be found here: http://groups.google.com/group/stomppy.

Proton Template Engine
The project page is at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/proton-te/.

Snake Wrangling for Kids
The project page is still here: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/.
The discussion group is here: http://groups.google.com/group/swfk

More to come…

I’ve finally added a new forum for Snake Wrangling for Kids (python programming book for kids), and another for stomp.py.

Neither pages were attracting a huge amount of comment traffic, but even the small number of comments was becoming unmanageable.

On the SWFK front, it looks like the French translation is approaching completion — the current draft looks brilliant (arguably better than the original). Michel has done an excellent job. This is the first translation, and I’m keen to see more…

I’ve just uploaded the latest version of Snake Wrangling for Kids (verson 0.7.7). This fixes a few minor issues pointed about by readers, and updates the illustrations to higher quality versions (thanks to Michel W). I’ve also, rather belatedly, re-published (is that a word?) the printable version on Lulu.com, which can be found here. At the moment, only the Windows version is available. Once Python3 is *easily* available for Linux and Mac, I’ll add the printable editions for those platforms as well.

A recent visit by Slashdotters (which I had no idea had happened until after the fact) finally tipped the download stats for SWFK over 10K. 11767 (at time of writing), to be exact.

I have no idea how that compares to ‘real’ books (i.e. stuff that is printed… or sold in fact), but it seems like a reasonably impressive number to me… at least, for an unmarketed, self-published effort.

Thanks for your support, and hopefully your kids are finding it useful.