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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?

#77

Post by RobertKerans »

shostack wrote: post #65
jetti wrote: 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?

Not that advanced. It does walk you through the basics; you should be able to work through it and understand what you've built and how it works (it emphasises and explains the lack of magic). + You should be able to build something pretty easily without ever having touched Elixir before; the book builds up your knowledge very steadily.

I would say maybe, from a language/syntax point of view pair it with "Programming Elixir", which is a good introduction to the language, again going through the concepts of it and building them up well - the Phoenix book goes pretty quickly over the language constructs, just giving you them when needed to understand how Phoenix is doing stuff.

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

#78

Post by ehsankia »

nether wrote: post #75

Accelerated C++ involves working on a program to analyze student grades. The book itself is excellent, but the overarching project is very dry.

That's the main issue I have with any "prebuilt" project. They generally tend to be quite dry and rarely relevant to my interests. Also, a big part of programming for me is being able to piece together knowledge from various places and putting it all together to make one thing. It's a bit like lego. Having a single project tutorial that shows you everything from start to finish misses the point a bit.

I do truly believe the best way of learning to code is by working on a decent size project, but I also believe that said project should be something you're fascinated and invested in, or else it feels more like a chore and is nowhere as effective.

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

#79

Post by aomega08 »

rickr wrote: 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.

I love that book and recommend it to anyone. The only thing I don't really like is its focus on MiniTest when practically everyone in the Ruby ecosystem has moved to RSpec. If I had to find a reason for this choice I'd say, one less gem to install and configure, and again convention over configuration.

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

#80

Post by hunt »

munificent wrote: post #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. :)

I can really recommend this book, I've worked through it and am implementing the interpreter in Rust. I've just finished the latest chapter and am looking forward to the future instalments.

Edit: here is the (WIP) intepreter: https://github.com/HarveyHunt/loxr

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