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

Post by Sn0wCoder » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

bpesquet wrote: post #94

modernerd wrote: post #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-sma…

I beg to differ: for all its qualities, Eloquent JavaScript is not a very beginner-friendly book. It goes quite deep into many JS intricaties and contains a lot of challenging tasks for people just discovering programming. More beginner-focused alternatives are https://www.freecodecamp.org and https://thejsway.net . Disclaimer: I've been teaching programming professionally for 15+ years and wrote the latter.

Post by Sn0wCoder » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

Sn0wCoder wrote: post #111

bpesquet wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ: for all its qualities, Eloquent JavaScript is not a very beginner-friendly book. It goes quite deep into many JS intricaties and contains a lot of challenging tasks for people just discovering programming. More beginner-focused alternatives are https://www.freecodecamp.org and https://thejsway.net . Disclaimer: I've been teaching programming professionally for 15+ years and wrote the latter.

I have recommended to beginners before and most of them thanked me. I skimmed the page for your book but did not see the link to the free version. I am on mobile so maybe just missed it. Says read free here, but here is not a link. Clicking the book takes you to Amazon.

Post by Nzen » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

cameron_b wrote: post #63

basicallydan wrote: post #2

If they don't exist, this is a good idea for anybody looking for a project to write a programming book

There are many, but the field is still wide open. Anyone with a particular domain experience should find a market. There are lots of starting from scratch guides, and few focused guides. for subject in ["Finance", "Contact Management", "Service Desk Automation", "Web Apps from scratch", "Web Apps on someone else's API", "Baseball Metrics"]: for language in ["R", "Go", "Python3", "Rust", "Lisp"]: print(f"Examples for…

  for subject in [
   "Finance",
   "Contact Management",
   "Service Desk Automation",
   "Web Apps from scratch",
   "Web Apps on someone else's API",
   "Baseball Metrics"
  ] : for language in [
   "R",
   "Go",
   "Python3",
   "Rust",
   "Lisp"
  ] : print(f"Examples for {subject} in {language} would make a good book.")

Post by lifewallet_dev » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

azemetre wrote: post #98

While not for beginners, if you'd like to learn rust I recently finished "Command line Rust" [1]. It was my first introduction to rust and the book was quite enjoyable. It starts off with teaching you the very basics of a command line (what it means to exit, true, or false, etc) and each chapter has you recreate a popular command line tool (like grep, cal, tail, wc) while introducing a new rust concept. The book also…

Post by AlwaysRock » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC