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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?

#111

Post by grimoald »

OK, you don't build a complete project, but it's a similar approach:

Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers http://greenteapress.com/thinkstats/

Here, you learn statistics by implementing statistics functions in Python along the way and use them to solve the questions in the book.

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

#112

Post by dom96 »

My Nim book[1] is sort of like this. Instead of working on a single project, most chapters have a little project (for example a chat CLI app or a Twitter-like website) which teaches you different things about Nim.

1 - https://manning.com/books/nim-in-action?a_aid=niminaction&a_...

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

#113

Post by sigstoat »

toss1941 wrote: post #60

I remember seeing a C++ (Borland) book that was entirely about building a flight simulator. Google is betraying my attempts to find it though, and i'm not sure who the actual publisher was. That was during the 90's when I was 14 or something so it was a bit above my head, but I remember almost buying it anyway. Edit: It may have been this: https://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Own-Flight-Sim/dp/15716902...

Flights of Fantasy

https://www.amazon.com/Flights-Fantasy-Programming-Video-Gam...

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

#114

Post by bdcravens »

aomega08 wrote: post #79
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.

I think MiniTest is a good starting point even if you end up going with Rspec, as MiniTest/jUnit style testing feels a little bit lower level. In the same sense, the book implements authentication from scratch, whereas many apps will end up using a library like Devise.

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

#116

Post by wyc »

I remember The Unix Programming Environment by Kernighan and Pike as an excellent introduction to Unix shells and general Unix programming. IIRC, throughout the chapters, it has you build some kind of interactive command line music organizer, which really demonstrates how much you can get done with a few simple shell scripts.

Amazon link:

https://www.amazon.com/Unix-Programming-Environment-Prentice...

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

#120

Post by sngz »

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.

is there something similar to this but for python based frameworks, or javascript based? Seems like every great tutorial / books that I find are using ruby
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