Check out Crafting Interpreters[0]. You learn about Chomsky formal language hierarchy, constructing context-free grammars, lexing, parsing, error reporting, etc by building your own programming language.
Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
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Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#12The Sam's Teach Yourself in 24 hours is a series of computing-related books:
https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/series/Sams-Teac...
Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been struggling to decide which one (of the two interpreter books you mentioned) to read. Any specific reason I should read one over the other?
I wrote "Crafting Interpreters" and read and very much enjoyed Thorsten's interpreters book. (I haven't gotten to his second one yet.) They are surprisingly alike. Mine takes you through two complete implementations of the same language: first as a tree-walk interpreter and then as a bytecode compiler. His first book does the former and his second book does the latter. Both are written in an informal friendly style a…
Nice review of Thorstens book. I read your book when I graduated college around 2018 and was unfulfilled at work. It was a lot of fun and I distinctly remember sitting in a coffee shop for hours reading through it and debugging my code.
Unsurprisingly my family asked what I wanted for Christmas and I put both your book and Thorstens on my list to reread .
Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#14The "From Nand to Tetris" course or in book form "The Elements of Computing Systems". This steps through building a computer from scratch. Starting with building logic gates from transistors, through to building a CPU and then writing assembly.
FWIW this book is great. It took me a couple months of immense dedication to finish everything from the first course.
Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#15Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction has you code a bunch of neat little projects, I'm especially fond of the substitution cypher solving program. It reminds me of Covert Action.
ty for the recommendation; for those interested in reading it here's a PDF version of it (via the author's website).
Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#16My curated and update list of Computer Graphics resources you can read online for free [0] with every item having a small description.
Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#17self plug: I wanted to learn how databases work internally, like how they store and retrieve data, build indexes, etc.
I built an educational KV store to teach someone to write a database from scratch. I have set up this project in TDD fashion with the tests. So, you start with simple functions, pass the tests, and the difficulty level goes up. There are hints if you get stuck. When all the tests pass, you would have written a persistent key-value store in the end.
Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been struggling to decide which one (of the two interpreter books you mentioned) to read. Any specific reason I should read one over the other?
I wrote "Crafting Interpreters" and read and very much enjoyed Thorsten's interpreters book. (I haven't gotten to his second one yet.) They are surprisingly alike. Mine takes you through two complete implementations of the same language: first as a tree-walk interpreter and then as a bytecode compiler. His first book does the former and his second book does the latter. Both are written in an informal friendly style a…
There is a sense of premium quality from your books, so I bought em. You haven’t let me down!
I have been curious. Why the choice of java as introductory level?
Maybe I’ve been lucky to choose my own tools over the years. But I still get hung up on this. It’s just that Java is so longform.
I’m not sure I ever really wrote a sort in it, without cheating. Besides showing off that I could, I probably installed groovy or later scala, mostly.
So heh. I had a pleasant headfake in “Crafting Interpreters” when it was revealed that the JVM machinery wasn’t going to get anyone the full distance.
Java just feels backwards, as the low-level code is simpler and smaller. Why is Java still seen as more accessible than [anything else]?
Is OOPs curriculum still that prevalent?
Or. Pointers? Pointers took me a long time, even after I got them. Is it pointers?
Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been struggling to decide which one (of the two interpreter books you mentioned) to read. Any specific reason I should read one over the other?
I wrote "Crafting Interpreters" and read and very much enjoyed Thorsten's interpreters book. (I haven't gotten to his second one yet.) They are surprisingly alike. Mine takes you through two complete implementations of the same language: first as a tree-walk interpreter and then as a bytecode compiler. His first book does the former and his second book does the latter. Both are written in an informal friendly style a…
There seem to be many ripoffs on Amazon. Just a quick search yielded this:
https://www.amazon.de/Crafting-Interpreters-Paperback-BOB/dp...
https://www.amazon.de/Crafting-Interpreters-Tracy-Shep/dp/B0...
https://www.amazon.de/Crafting-Interpreters-Steven-Billups/d...
Have you already tried getting Amazon to remove them and failed?
Re: Ask HN: Similar books to “Raytracing in one Weekend”?
#20I would recommend Crafting Interpreters ( https://craftinginterpreters.com ) or Interpreter Book ( https://interpreterbook.com/ ). Excellent ways to learn how to build an interpreter. You have a functioning interpreter by the end of it, and it's easy enough to extend it into new concepts! I'm using some of the lessons learned from that to build a custom interpreter for a small project I'm working on. It's really fun!
I've been struggling to decide which one (of the two interpreter books you mentioned) to read. Any specific reason I should read one over the other?
I've bought and read both, but the one I used for my interpreter was Interpreter Book by Thorsten Ball, because it's written in Go and Go is currently my favorite language. They both work well, though!