Ask HN: Books that teach programming by building a series of small projects?

It is common knowledge that when first learning programming, one should start with small projects to build something real rather than learning rules and syntax of the language only.

Which are some of the best books that take a project based approach in teaching programming to a beginner?

If we're talking a complete beginner with maybe only "hello world" level skills I recommend the Lego BOOST set: https://www.lego.com/en-fi/product/boost-creative-toolbox-17...

It teaches you step by step the basics of programming (loops, function calls etc) using a scratch-like programming language.

Not a book, but CS50x is a freely available course with high quality videos and lecture notes. The lecture exercises are programming projects of sorts. It teaches programming from scratch with C and then Python. Plus, since a lot of students take it, there are lots of online resources with tips, like the CS50 subreddit.

https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2023/

The Advanced Beginner blog post series by Robert Heaton is great.

There’s quite a few:

- Zed Shaw’s Learn More Python the Hard Way[1]

- Brian Hogan’s Exercises for Programmers (best for beginners or for learning a new language)[2]

- Hal Fulton’s The Ruby Way[3]

- Chris Ferdinandi’s Vanilla JS Academy[4]

- Marc-Andre Cournoyer’s Great Code Club (it’s old, and the community doesn’t exist anymore, but i think he still maintains it)[5]

- A few python books from No Starch Press (notably those authored by Al Sweigart)

I learned the most as a beginner from Zed Shaw’s work, and from reading open source code.

Once you’re done with the initial “learn from tutorials” phase, there’s no better resource than reading open source code.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Learn-More-Python-Hard-Way/dp/0134123...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Exercises-Programmers-Challenges-Deve...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Way-Programming-Addison-Wesley-P...

[4] https://vanillajsacademy.com/

[5] https://www.greatcodeclub.com/