Welcome to Bots Inc! BotsInc is the environment of the book Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots I wrote over the last 4 years. With Bots Inc you will learn how to program robots in an interactive environment. Bots Inc proposes three teaching approaches: direct command of robots, scripting robots and programming robots. The book contains 24 chapters going step by step over topics with a lot of examples. Bots Inc is fun but it is not a toy, it teaches you 100% real programming. Bots Inc is built on top of the rich open-source multimedia Squeak environment that you can also discover.

My goal is to explain key elementary programming concepts (such as loops, abstraction, composition, and conditionals) to novices of all ages. I believe that learning by experimenting and solving problems with fun is central to human knowledge acquisition. Therefore, I have presented programming concepts through simple but not trivial problems such as drawing golden rectangles or simulating animal behavior. The ideal reader I have in mind is an individual who wants to have fun programming. This person may be a teenager or an adult, a schoolteacher, or somebody teaching programming to children in some other organization. Such an individual does not have to be fluent in programming in any language. As a father of two young boys I also wrote this book for all the parents that want to have fun programming with their kids in a powerful interactive environment. Programming in Squeak is an interactive, fun but deep experience. The present book teaches elementary programming concepts, the following book will introduce a new fun environment and teach object-oriented programming. The second edition was release in November 2005.

The environment that I developed is totally free and under the MIT open-source license following the open-source philosophy of Squeak. Here is the Apress official web site Apress website

The book received the Award of PCPlus magazine of September 2005. The book received the Recommended Award of Bitwise in February 2006. .

February 2005, Stéphane Ducasse (stephane.ducasse@free.fr)