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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?

#141

Post by jonmoshier »

zeptomu wrote: post #133
superquest wrote: post #40

Miguel Grinberg's "Flask Web Development" [1] is an excellent introduction Python-based web development. You build a Twitter-clone. The book is an adaptation of the authors 18-part tutorial on the same topic [2]. [1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920031116.do [2] https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial...

Remark that the article is rather old (although revisited 2014, however that's still an eternity in webdev world). Although I like flask (it was my first library to do "web stuff") I miss especially the fact that authentication is not part of the core lib, but only available via third-party extensions. That may not be a problem for an experienced dev, but for a starter in web-dev I highly appreciate a library or fram…

I think they don't include it not because you should roll your own (you really shouldn't) but because they don't make the assumption that you'll need it. Once they start adding that stuff by default they'll no longer be a 'microframework'.

But yes, definitely grab a third party extension for auth :)

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

#142

Post by mathgeek »

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 don't really like is its focus on MiniTest when practically everyone in the Ruby ecosystem has moved to RSpec

Is this true? I know RSpec is the popular one in open source, but last I checked the two were still pretty even as far as big name recommendations. I used to believe RSpec was the default when I first started Rails development, but as a professional dev I had seen plenty of Minitest implementation.

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

#143

Post by MistahKoala »

diminoten wrote: post #30

I dunno why, but I was kind of hoping there would be non-CS answers for this too, like how to woodwork, or like tying flies.

Seems reasonable. I was hoping to see a few more, too! Only mention of the scrap metal project so far.

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

#144

Post by bcoughlan »

Not a book, but I loved this series about building a Pascal interpreter (currently 12 parts): https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/

It was always on my bucket list to learn to write programming languages, but it's very daunting - this made it easy to learn in bite-sized chunks.

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

#147

Post by aphextron »

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.

This is also the first thing that came to mind for me. One of the finest web dev tutorials ever written.

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

#148

Post by justanotheratom »

justanotheratom wrote: post #13

F# Applied http://products.tamizhvendan.in/fsharp-applied/

Forgot to mention:

First chapter of the book takes you through creating your own "Suave" functional web development library, which was a lot of fun and eye opening.

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

#149

Post by AsyncAwait »

sfifs wrote: post #64

I learned C++ back in the 90s using a book called "Type and Learn C++" - it involved building a text editor.

Another good one on the topic of text editors is "The Craft of Text Editing"[1]

1 - https://www.finseth.com/craft/

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