By Linda Liukas
A story about a fearless little girl who thinks like a coder, followed by puzzles that let your child think that way too.
Ruby is small, stubborn, and sees the whole world as a puzzle to be solved. Her dad leaves her a note with five gems to find, and off she goes, meeting characters who each stand for a real coding idea along the way. That's the front half of the book: a genuine story. The back half is where it opens up, because every chapter is followed by hands-on exercises your child does with a pencil, no computer needed, learning to spot patterns, put steps in order, and break a big problem into smaller ones.
It scratches two different itches in one book. A younger child gets a proper story with a heroine worth cheering for, and a computer-obsessed child gets real exercises that build the way a programmer's brain works: sequencing, pattern-matching, breaking things down. Because none of it happens on a screen, you can hand it to a child who's already glued to devices and give their coding love a paper-and-pencil outlet. It's the one on this shelf that turns reading into playing.