IterativeRobot, CommandRobot, or SampleRobot for brand new programmers?

[AlexanderTheOK]

I also prefer the iterative robot to Command Based since a lot of the important functionality of the Command Based system can be written using the Runnable interface and the ScheduledExecutor in Java. This provides both the benefit of reducing the number of black boxes in your code, as well as being a valuable learning experience. (There might also be some features that Command based doesn't have that you can bake into your own solution.)