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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?

#71

Post by michaelcampbell »

Zhyl wrote: post #35
kennyfrc wrote: 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…

Specifically "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" is my favourite Al Sweigart book.

I'm not much of a Python guy, but concur with this; I enjoyed this book and did get something out of it.

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

#77

Post by fedeb95 »

Parenthesis: keep in mind that while learning by doing might be a good way to begin, even if I wouldn't be so sure as wether one "should" or "could" start along such a path, at some point you'll be stuck without studying the "boring" stuff you've delayed. True programming is realising the boring stuff weren't so boring in the first place

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

#78

Post by tasuki »

I'm very much a fan of a project-based approach. However, I wouldn't recommend any book for that. I'd ask the apprentice what they'd like to achieve, and try to reduce scope as much as possible.

There's a world of difference in motivation when building something you want to exist, versus building a project because a book told you so.

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

#79

Post by culopatin »

My biggest gripe with all the project tutorials I’ve seen is that really quickly you get into a “ok I get what we’re doing” and then just copy the code they provide. At the end of the day you did zero mental workout because you didn’t have to figure out the code. I hope to find one of these that guides you but doesn’t give you the code immediately, but has a code answer key at the end or something. I get it that it’s not easy to do, but there must be one out there that doesn’t spoon-feed you everything.
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