By Reshma Saujani
An illustrated introduction to how coding works, built around true stories of girls and women who used it to make things they cared about.
Reshma Saujani started the Girls Who Code organization, and this is her explaining what coding is to someone who's never touched it. She takes the big ideas one at a time: what a loop does, what a variable holds, how an algorithm is really just a set of steps in the right order. The pages are bright and illustrated, and the explanations stay short. Woven between them are true stories of girls and women who learned to code and then built something with it, from apps to tools that solved a problem in their own town. It reads about as much like encouragement as instruction.
It's the big-picture book, not a how-to. A child who mainly wants to make a game will get more out of a hands-on Scratch or Python guide; this one suits the child who's curious about what coding is and who does it. The core ideas are explained clearly enough for a curious ten-year-old to follow, and the profiles set a range of real women beside the concepts, which widens who a child pictures as a programmer. It's pitched at girls in particular, so that's where it fits best, though the explanations hold up for any child.