I don't know the real reason why the book didn't succeed, but that content didn't help. You're trying to impress young kids with concepts that don't and can't have any meaning for them at their stage of development. Dr. Seuss books have social and even political topics that are presented in a way that they can grasp. Three and four years-olds are developing concepts of fairness, so Seuss books stretch them and do so in an appealing way. But hash maps and inheritance?

Not to pile on, but I agree about the complicated words. But you could introduce some of them if done in the right way.

I went back and looked at the pictures without the words, and it's actually easier to just see what's going on. A couple of the ideas are simple enough that one picture can give you the idea. But others, like yak shaving and garbage collecting, would need a story line and multiple pictures/pages.

You could make an entire series out of these books! There are many great childrens' series, and you can study them to see how they present stories, what kind of themes they touch on, how the characters interact. If it were me writing them, I would parody every great children's book series with each programmer book. A bernstein bears book, a clifford book, a fraggle rock book, a Dr Seuss book, a Curious George book, etc. Each book could parody a famous series, but tell a story to explain a programming concept. You can do much simpler ones for teaching ABC's but it will best as simple concepts that can be grasped with a picture.

Yak shaving must be SV slang or something because I've been doing this nearly two decades and I literally never heard that term before... and the rhyme/picture was not helpful in teaching me what yak shaving is.

However, when I Googled the term I understood it.

A reader may learn a few software terms but I don't think this book would teach anyone, child or adult, a fundamental understanding of programming; which is what I would look for in a children's book. It also significantly narrows your market to only people who already know how to program.

Yak shaving is from the late 90's. It's part of the the jargon file so it's more of a FOSS term.

What color is your Yak shed?

http://thecodelesscode.com/ , but written to a younger audience.

Glad to hear you like the rhymes. Your right, some of the words are a advanced for a little kid. Many of them were just so I could tell my son "The Garbage Collector was too slow today"(I work in Java) or "I had to shave a yak today."

I like a couple of the rhymes, perhaps it's just me, but most of them don't scan properly. Mind you I find this is a common complaint for me, perhaps my rhythm is off.

Example: Debugging should have "to figure out just // what has gone wrong".

That said I doubt that's much of a bar to sales.

To me it's a novelty book "A Programming ABC" that people (probably non-programmers) would buy as a gift. The artwork is amazing IMO.

As a teaching resource it seems more like a pile of quirky chapter pages that would preceed in depth descriptions.

I wonder if the pages would work as merchandise, or just framed artwork.

If I knew about this a few years back, I probably would have bought it. On the fence now as my youngest is 5, and all the rest are past the picture-books stage.