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

Not OP but it could be difficult learning two languages and frameworks at the same time. If you really want to use Python for the backend while learning React, perhaps try Flask? It's much simpler than Django, especially for tutorial-type projects.

For Flask there's https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/.

It's a 20+ video course where you build a real world SAAS app. We build up 1 big app through out the course.

There's also 30-40+ hours worth of self guided optional assignments to add features into the application based on what you learn in each section. It's all positioned in the form of specifications, similar to how it would be when doing any type of job or contract gig.

Funny enough, many people have contacted me saying they took the course but don't even use Python and Flask. They were just experienced programmers using other web frameworks but wanted to see how the app all comes together so they can use the same patterns in their framework of choice.

For Rust, try Rust in Action https://www.manning.com/books/rust-in-action.

It has several worked examples, including a key/value append-only database, a CPU emulator, an NTP client, a floating point implementation, multiple graphical applications, a binary files inspector and a few others!

I believe one reason buying books is so popular is the reader leans the direction of being spoon fed. How many times have we picked up books and never actually read em?

My anecdote, since I already had projects in mind and just wanted to synthesize how things were glued together A to Z: I went to SourceForge/GitHub/BitBucket and cloned repos for projects for the language of choice, build them, run the tests.

Also, https://github.com/search and lookup stuff of similar topic / using the same libraries (words like MIT, ISC, Apache 2, BSD are a good sign). Then check if it's permissively licensed. Also, in the end, you likely won't ever end up forking or copying. You're just getting the knowledge of how it's glued, and probably will wire stuff in uniquely for your case.

Building these projects in itself teaches the ropes of getting an environment setup (googling build errors, checking issue tracker), dependencies, test suites, and building a production-ready package.

I kept the best projects I found at https://github.com/tony/.dot-config/blob/master/.vcspull.yam.... Purely for studying the source of.

Python : Flask, Werkzeug, Django, SQLAlchemy

JS : Express, Backbone, blog posts by Addy Osmani and JS enterprise architecture and Derick Bailey on Marionette (but i don't think the backbone would be as relevant today, it def paved the way to modern frontend we see today)

C++ : OpenTTD

In the end, there weren't many books I found espoused building projects. I already had an idea of what to build - I just needed enough to "ramp up", but if you want books:

JavaScript Patterns: Build Better Applications with Coding and Design Patterns

Examples applied directly to the task at hand. All about scoping.

A python book, that hits different areas than this JS book would be The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python: https://docs.python-guide.org/

C++: Scott Meyer books are great

General programming: Code Complete

Does it have you write queries that exceed 30 lines?