Huh, this is not what I expected. Ana Bell is my undergraduate advisor at MIT. I do not think that these choices are particularly the best for someone with no programming or computer science experience whatsoever, as others have said. What strikes me as particularly odd is that I believe she teaches 6.0001, which is a relatively new "very much a complete intro" half-semester course for programming, taught in Python. I suppose I would have expected more truly beginner-friendly material in her recommendations.