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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?

#62
post #14

Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial ( https://www.railstutorial.org/ ) is a great example of this. It'll run you through building a twitter clone and introduce you to git, heroku, a bit of CSS/HTML, and even goes into AJAX a bit. I can't recommend it enough to people looking to get into rails.

Not only that, but for me what was super helpful was the "this is how real developers would approach this" in terms of covering lots of workflow things, design patterns, Git, unit tests, setting up your dev environment, sprucing it up with some gems, etc.

Can't recommend it enough.

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

#65
post #3

Programming Phoenix Productive |> Reliable |> Fast. It goes through building a website that starts from the beginning and goes up to Phoenix Channels (websockets) for a real-time video streaming application that lets users comment on the video at specific times and it is broadcasted to all other users.

How advanced is this? I'm a beginner Rubyist with some Rails experience and have been interested in trying Phoenix out but I'm not an experienced web dev by any means so the web socket stuff is a bit intimidating.

Does it walk through the basics will enough? Or will I have built something with no idea how it actually works?

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

#66
What a delightful coincidence! I just posted the next chapter on my in-progress book "Crafting Interpreters" which walks you through implementing an interpreter (well, two actually) from scratch, a chapter at a time:

http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/

I really liked "Build Your Own Lisp" too. Fun book. :)

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

#67
I bought this a year or two ago: https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Programming-Gurus-Advanced-Gra...

It's basically a set of tutorials that lead you through the steps of building a software 3D graphics rasterizer. It covers rasterizing, lighting, shading, shadows, textures, etc, and the math behind each set of concepts. It's built on late-90s C and DirectX, but the capabilities used are covered by just about any game programming library. The author builds kind of an abstraction library on top of the DirectX code, and that's pretty easy to rewrite in whichever language and toolset you're comfortable with.

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

#68
post #36
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks awesome. Might be a fun way to help my kids learn CS once they're old enough.

You're fooling no-one, Shimon... ;) Just a joke: the course is by Noam Nisan & Shimon Schocken The accompanying book is "The Elements of Computing Systems" and Part 1 is available as a course on Coursera. I highly recommend it; just finishing the Coursera course myself and I'll definitely be doing Part 2.

I'll second this. I worked through the book and downloadable exercises a few years ago. It's a great way to learn about the multiple layers of abstraction that a modern program sits upon.

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

#69

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.

I've played many games created with Inform7. All beautiful works of art. Emily short has a few on her site. Just download something like Gargoyle to play the image.

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

#70

The Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap series by David J. Gingery.

The series is certainly worth reading for the learning, but actually doing it? Don't bother. The books were written when hobby-level machine tools were very expensive. In these days of cheap Asian imports, it's not worth building your own from DIY castings unless you're doing it for fun.

I will say that the first book (metal casting) is very useful, because you can learn to make aluminum castings easily and then machine them on your cheap import/worn out old American Iron.

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