@Sean I agree, my first run animal examples were a mess. Consider it gone. I like your real world IO example. It's the best motivation I've ever read to get into the device driver business myself :o) but I think a single page worth of fantastic animals (my second run examples) can provide a high level run through of the is-a/has-a oop stuff. And I'm just more of an expert on animals than devices.
If I can get through that overview quick, I'll then head into the simple Android/iOS UI stuff for "real" code that does something (as per @Coda's suggestion). I put "real" in quotes because at first we'll just be putting the pretty pictures and buttons on our nexus/iphones (but even this will eat up the pages quick). Eventually the real "real" code will be something like write your own email client for your phone (or similar).
@Steve that's a good idea. A good chapter/section title would be "Debugging Lua: What To Do When the Print Statements Fail" I think this would be most effective if I can settle on a single IDE with debugger support. (And tbh, the freer the better so I need to look at ZBS). And then just cover step into/out of/over/run/inspect vars with screenshots. Any further ideas on that?
@Everyone, regarding the "OO Overused" thread. You know, I love the functional languages. If you give me first class functions, lexical scoping, closures and tail call elimination, I'm yours! But OO is what puts asses in the seats. Beginning and experienced programmers flock to the OO books and blogs because it is the currently accepted paradigm. It's what gets you a paying job because it's what the bosses and the managers want.
"Java is the COBOL of the 21st century" I love it.
