This book is the first book on programming as the core subject of a liberal arts education. Its main focus is the design process that leads from problem statements to well-organized solutions; it deemphasizes the study of programming language details, algorithmic minutiae, and specific application domains. Our desire to focus on the design process requires two radical innovations for introductory courses. The first innovation is a set of explicit design guidelines. Existing curricula tend to provide vague and ill-defined suggestions, such as ``design from top to bottom'' or ``make the program structural.'' We have instead developed design guidelines that lead students from a problem statement to a computational solution in step-by-step fashion with well-defined intermediate products. In the process they learn to read, to analyze, to organize, to experiment, to think in a systematic manner. The second innovation is a radically new programming environment. In the past, texts on programming ignored the role of the programming environment in the learning process; they simply assumed that students had access to a professional environment. This book provides a programming environment for beginners. It also grows with the students as they master more and more of the material until it supports a full-fledged language for the whole spectrum of programming tasks: large-scale programming as well as scripting. Our guidelines are formulated as a number of program design recipes.1 A design recipe guides a beginning programmer through the entire problem-solving process. With design recipes, a beginner almost never again stares at a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen. Instead, the student will check the design recipe and use the question-and-answer guidelines to make some progress.

Despite its social importance, the topic of the significance of race and gender in the law of torts has not received sustained attention largely because, on its surface, the world of torts appears divided between those who suffer injury and those who inflict injury, categories that are race and gender neutral. To be sure, there is a vague awareness that particular social groups are more likely to sustain certain types of injuries, for example, that women are disproportionately hurt by domestic violence and that African American children are at greater risk than white children of suffering injury from exposure to lead paint. However, the conventional wisdom is that the legal rules, concepts, and structures for liability no longer take account of the race or gender of the parties.