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Free documents came to the rescue. Earlier in the year, Richard Stallman
had introduced me to Allen Downey. Both of us had written to Richard
expressing an interest in developing free educational materials. Allen had
already written a first-year computer science textbook, How to Think Like a
Computer Scientist. When I read this book, I knew immediately that I
wanted to use it in my class. It was the clearest and most helpful computer
science text I had seen. It emphasized the processes of thought involved in
programming rather than the features of a particular language. Reading it
immediately made me a better teacher.

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist was not just an excellent
book, but it had been released under a GNU public license, which meant it could
be used freely and modified to meet the needs of its user. Once I decided to
use Python, it occurred to me that I could translate Allen's original Java
version of the book into the new language. While I would not have been able to
write a textbook on my own, having Allen's book to work from made it possible
for me to do so, at the same time demonstrating that the cooperative
development model used so well in software could also work for educational
materials.

Working on this book for the last two years has been rewarding for both my
students and me, and my students played a big part in the process. Since I
could make instant changes whenever someone found a spelling error or difficult
passage, I encouraged them to look for mistakes in the book by giving them a
bonus point each time they made a suggestion that resulted in a change in the
text. This had the double benefit of encouraging them to read the text more
carefully and of getting the text thoroughly reviewed by its most important
critics, students using it to learn computer science.

For the second half of the book on object-oriented programming, I knew
that someone with more real programming experience than I had would be
needed to do it right. The book sat in an unfinished state for the better
part of a year until the open source community once again provided the
needed means for its completion.

I received an email from Chris Meyers expressing interest in the book.
Chris is a professional programmer who started teaching a programming course
last year using Python at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. The
prospect of teaching the course had led Chris to the book, and he started
helping out with it immediately. By the end of the school year he had created
a companion project on our Website at http://www.ibiblio.org/obp
called Python for Fun and was working with some of my most advanced
students as a master teacher, guiding them beyond where I could take them.

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