IMHO, Zed is right. I have been looking for books targeted to beginner programmers so I could recommend them to my friends, but most books unfortunately fail on this point.
A Notable exception I found is "Learn you a Haskell for Great Good!". It is as good for beginning coders as it is for early (or advanced) ones.
The author made the effort to describe some relatively basic things, and it was simple enough (okay, with a few calls to me here and there) for an Art major friend of mine to start with programming, and with Haskell. I can't recommend this book enough.
> I have been looking for books targeted to beginner programmers so I could recommend them to my friends, but most books unfortunately fail on this point.
My favourite book for this by far is How to Design Programs: http://htdp.org
It assumes knowledge of arithmetic and maybe a tiny bit of algebra but not much else.
A Notable exception I found is "Learn you a Haskell for Great Good!". It is as good for beginning coders as it is for early (or advanced) ones.
The author made the effort to describe some relatively basic things, and it was simple enough (okay, with a few calls to me here and there) for an Art major friend of mine to start with programming, and with Haskell. I can't recommend this book enough.