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

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

#21

Post by muhammadusman »

carapace wrote: post #17

Not quite what you're talking about but the best book on car mechanics I ever read... It was red, and textbook-sized, hardcover. Lots of drawings. It literally started with an explosion in a can, and then progressively enhanced that idea step-by-step: add a lid to the can to capture the energy, add a lever to keep the can lid from flying away, and then attach the lever to a wheel so that it returns the lid to the top…

I would love to know the name of this book, sounds perfect for learning about combustion engines.

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

#23

Post by travisjeffery »

I'm currently writing a book for PragProg called Building Distributed Services with Go (though it mostly applies to other languages too) that's walks you through building a distributed database from scratch. You can sign up on this mailing list to know when it's available: https://travisjeffery.us4.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1e3ff7....

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

#25

Post by devrob »

Hope it’s cool to link our own stuff ?

I’m writing one right now on building a mini trading bot platform.

It would be great to hear what you like/dislike in these types of books.

I don’t have any marketing website up at the moment but I created this mailing list if you’re interested in following the developments http://bit.ly/tradingbotplatformbook

(Link redirects to https://cdn.forms-content.sg-form.com/f306b813-475c-11ea-9be...)

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

#26

Post by djhworld »

I've been making my way through "Writing an Intepreter in Go" and "Writing a compiler in Go" https://interpreterbook.com/

The Go stuff is really just a means to an end, the real value comes from the practical learnings of how to build a functioning interpreter and compiler (and virtual machine!) for a programming language the author made up called Monkey.

It's not a book full of theory but it lays some nice foundations that might help you understand the theory better :)

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

#27

Post by dilap »

Already mentioned in the first thread, but "Crafting Interpreters" is excellent.

In the first half of the book you write an interpreter for a simple scripting language; in the second half of the book, you write compiler to bytecode + vm.

Very clear, fun, excellent writing. Highly recommended.

It was also kind of amazing to very quickly have something that ran more quickly than python!

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

#28

Post by banana_maker »

* The Rails Tutorial - https://www.railstutorial.org/

This book (although an older edition) is largely what got me into programming, and taught me so much about Rails.

* Programming WebAssembly with Rust - https://pragprog.com/book/khrust/programming-webassembly-wit...

This book steps through learning about web assembly, writing it by hand, and then implementing a server for webassembly. I had so many misconceptions about webassembly/wasm before reading this.

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

#30

Post by pknopf »

jlelonm wrote: post #29

VERY interested in "Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications" I noticed that it was released Sept 2018. That's not too old, but I'm curious if there's a more up-to-date version.

That's a funny joke. But really, I'm sure it's outdated.

There really shouldn't be any JS books in print...

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