This web site includes supplementary material for Talking With Computers written by Tom Dean and published by Cambridge University Press. You'll find a separate web page for each chapter providing easy access to code fragments from the book, tips on finding and installing software, links to online resources, and corrections to the published text. This material was produced in collaboration with Katrina Ligett and Damien Suttle. There is also an instructional manual providing sample lectures, exercises and projects for a class taught at Brown on based on the book.
I mention in the book's preface that lectures and books adopt styles of teaching and assume styles of learning. People have widely differing learning styles. Some like to learn the general principles first and then apply them to specific problems. Others aren't interested in general principles until they've seen lots of examples. Some are happy to absorb information passively and others prefer to actively participate in discussions. Some like to work in groups and others are more comfortable working on their own.
In this book and in the classes I teach based on this book, I like to explore different styles of teaching and learning. In class I like to mix discussions in which I both participate and moderate, hands-on programming sessions in which we experiment and share ideas, lectures in which I occasionally pontificate, and break-out project design and brainstorming sessions in which I get to flit from one group to another listening and propagating ideas. In the best of situations, a mixture of styles emerges based on what seems to work.
If you'd like to learn more about learning styles, teaching styles and how they interact, especially with regard to teaching science and technology, check out the articles by Felder and Silverman listed in the bibliography [Felder1993, Felder and Silverman1988]. Some of their papers are available on Richard Felder's Home Page