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

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

#41
post #30

"Hands on Rust" teaches Rust by building a rogue like game step by step. Before that there's a chapter where you rebuild Flappy Bird from scratch that teaches the "basics" before diving into more advanced concepts in the rogue like. I liked the approach and recommend the book but it's fast paced and expects quite a bit from the reader (it's excellent if you have some programming experience already but probably daunti…

I second this one. This was a great book.

There are some follow ups to the final project I like

Compile to WASM so you can run on the web: https://hands-on-rust.com/2021/11/06/run-your-rust-games-in-...>

Port to the Bevy ECS: https://saveriomiroddi.github.io/learn_bevy_ecs_by_ripping_o...>

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

#42
post #9

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…

Is Shaw's first Python book any good?

Shaw has had some strong opinions that have gone significantly against the mainstream viewpoint in Python. Whether he's right or not doesn't really matter - as an educator that is targeting the mainstream it's fairly important to stay on that and not introduce personal bias around these things. Unfortunately his criticism was often not very constructive.

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

#44
I recently finished the book that teaches programming by developing games using DragonRubyGameToolkit. Really loved this book.

_____

Python Crash Course by Eric Matthes has a section dedicated to projects.

I really liked this book.

This is what taught me Python.

I knew C before.

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

#47
For Swift:

https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ (I've had more success introducing programming with this than with any of the links below; it's a very compelling intro for those who already own an iPad/Mac, and the core concepts are generalisable to other languages/environments even if it's specific to Apple's APIs and hardware.)

~~~

For Python:

https://automatetheboringstuff.com

https://nostarch.com/big-book-small-python-projects

~~~

For JS:

https://eloquentjavascript.net (project-based and for beginners)

https://javascript30.com (not for total beginners or self-study, would need a friend/tutor)

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

#49
My Cloud Resume Challenge project [0] and book [1] uses a set of small, stackable mini-projects to introduce beginners to many of the pragmatic skills used in cloud software engineering.

[0] https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/ [1] https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/book/

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