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Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#41
If you are interested in assembly language concepts and don't mind something slightly archaic, I thoroughly enjoyed this book: https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Nortons-Assembly-Language-Book/...

It goes through lessons that build up to a pretty good interactive disk editor (DSKPATCH) written entirely in x86 assembly.

Its the book that got 12 year old me out of the BASIC ghetto.

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#42

Anything by Manning that ends with "In Action". I volunteer to be a technical reviewer if there is a new technology I want to learn (and get a free physical book!)

How did you get started as a technical reviewer? I love reading technology books. It would be great to get early access and be able to talk to the writers directly.

You can either ping existing authors or hit up the publishers. Squeaky wheel gets the grease. They're always looking for folks.

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#43
so, this isn't exactly what you are after; but, I've always had a bunch of little exercises and projects that I just kind of go through in a new language/platform as a learning exercise.

Examples:

1. given a large file, or set of files, write a program/routine to count the number of times an arbitrary sequence of characters appears. No regular expressions or other pattern matching helpers from a library/sdk, you have to do it all yourself. This one is pretty small, but there's lots of opportunity for optimization.

2. build a link shortener service with some analytics/tracking.

3. write a simple tokenizer for whatever syntax/language you feel like. JSON is a super easy one.

4. write a little website crawler. multithread it. implement rate limiting (something more advanced than random sleeps; e.g. token bucket, etc...).

5. make a couple easy data structures yourself. If the language/platform you are working in has the same structure in an SDK (or there's a good open source one), write yours to the same interface and then run it through their test suite. e.g. linked lists, queues, etc...

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#45
Aaron Reed has a terrific book, "Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7" (http://inform7.textories.com) that walks you through building a complete (and fairly sophisticated) text adventure.

Inform 7 is very much a niche programming language, but it's really interesting and unusual, well worth investigating if you want to broaden your horizons. Vaguely Prolog-like, but written in natural language.

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#47
post #41

If you are interested in assembly language concepts and don't mind something slightly archaic, I thoroughly enjoyed this book: https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Nortons-Assembly-Language-Book/... It goes through lessons that build up to a pretty good interactive disk editor (DSKPATCH) written entirely in x86 assembly. Its the book that got 12 year old me out of the BASIC ghetto.

What are you working on today? Are you still using assembly?

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#49

Anything by Manning that ends with "In Action". I volunteer to be a technical reviewer if there is a new technology I want to learn (and get a free physical book!)

How did you get started as a technical reviewer? I love reading technology books. It would be great to get early access and be able to talk to the writers directly.

They occasionally send out email notices. Check their website for more information: https://www.manning.com/manuscript-reviews

Re: Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?

#50
Two decent ones for game development:

https://howtomakeanrpg.com/

Walks through building a JRPG-style game with Lua. Pretty impressive for the price, especially with all the royalty-free assets that are included.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Programming_an_RTS_Game...

A little dated now, (although DirectX 9 isn't quite dead yet), but this one has some pretty interesting topics. Good chapter on procedural terrain generation, some basic pathfinding, minimaps and fog-of-war.

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