As the father of a nearly 6 year old girl, my first reaction when seeing the nice drawings and "programming for kids" was "COOOL! How much? Let me get my wallet out!". But then I saw "32 pages", and... yeah, that flipped my skeptic bit too. 32 pages is fine, but what am I getting there? An extremely broad but shallow overview? A few concepts explained... how? A neat story about how cool computers are? I don't really get a good sense of what all is covered in the book. Any of those things might make a fine book that I would buy - I really like the art shown - but "computer programming for kids" in such a short book just doesn't sound realistic.
The old Usborne computer programming books got a lot done in about 50 pages. But then they were quite textually dense, and by no means perfect as teaching tools either https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7110676 .
Yeah, 50 pages of text might get you something. 32 pages of mostly drawings gets you... The Gruffalo ( http://www.amazon.com/Gruffalo-Julia-Donaldson/dp/0142403873... ), a popular book for kids that we also own. So there's nothing wrong with the format, but just don't over promise in terms of what it is.
It's 32+16 pages, which totals 48... so if you're happy with 50, it's a bit strange to be upset about 32 pages of story and 16 pages of activities?
edit: It's much shorter than 50 pages full of text -- but I think this project looks great, especially for the target audience. IMNHO there's a pretty thin line between children's books like this, and when those actually interested (and a little older, maybe) can get started with any old programming book (many of the Ruby and Python books should work fine -- if we could learn 68000 asm in a foreign language from a magazine at 12, surely most of the "proper" books should be within reach of a motivated 10 year old?). What's needed is some books and materials to make the field interesting and fun to get into.
