Agreed. And since when is criticism a bad thing, esp. on HN? Especially since most of it here seemed meant to start a discussion, as in "I'm not sure this is the best way to teach programming, wouldn't X be better."

I thought this would be a worthwhile discussion to have as opposed to only useless "OMG this is the BEST thing ever" comments.

The initial comments appeared to me to be skewed toward criticism that was negative and/or tangential to the book's goals. It appears to have improved somewhat.