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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?

#191

Post by digianarchist »

azemetre wrote: post #174
racl101 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad we can buy the book standalone without getting a membership to O'Reilly.

I may sound like a shill but I think paying for O'Reilly is worth it. You get access to many books and videos outside the O'Reilly publisher. Definitely worth it, I tend to read a tech book a month (maybe 2 if it's "light.") Many of the books being suggested in the other comments are available as well (will definitely start Hands-On Rust because it seems very cool, and Practical Common Lisp shortly afterwards). Out o…

It's free if you have a Toronto Public Library card.

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

#192

Post by digianarchist »

culopatin wrote: post #79

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…

Tips that have helped me:

1. Typing out the code.

2. Going off route. Change things. Personalize examples. Break things and fix them.

3. Look up the docs for the language/framework/library and see how you can extend the project after each chapter.

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

#193

Post by nesarkvechnep »

globalise83 wrote: post #38
nesarkvechnep wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. It’s not about machine learning, neural networks but the more approachable AI of the 80s.

Haven't tried his, but can GPT3 write code that results in 1980s style AI?

Why not go ask it?

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

#194

Post by kriro »

maCDzP wrote: post #129

I like “The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles”. You build a whole computer from scratch through small projects. Sure, you want learn a specific language, but you’ll grock programming in general.

I highly recommend this, it made the whole topic of "how does a computer actually work" approachable for me. On their website there's a projects section where they highlight things their students did and there's a project that re-creates the built computer in an FPGA (I belive some ice40) I also recommend this as a follow up.

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

#195

Post by smckk »

I recommend the Deitel[0] series for Python and C family languages like Java, C# etc. With hundreds of complete examples to follow (not code snippets) and exercises to challenge you, you will do better with these books as a beginner.

My strategy is to get to the 10th chapter of the book skipping the exercises, then go back and try them with a better overall understanding of the language and its nuances.

Great series.

[0] https://deitel.com/

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

#196

Post by shrugsworth »

azemetre wrote: post #174
racl101 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad we can buy the book standalone without getting a membership to O'Reilly.

I may sound like a shill but I think paying for O'Reilly is worth it. You get access to many books and videos outside the O'Reilly publisher. Definitely worth it, I tend to read a tech book a month (maybe 2 if it's "light.") Many of the books being suggested in the other comments are available as well (will definitely start Hands-On Rust because it seems very cool, and Practical Common Lisp shortly afterwards). Out o…

I'm curious why you pay for those services and not the others. Is it a matter of topics, teaching style?

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

#197

Post by azemetre »

shrugsworth wrote: post #196
azemetre wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may sound like a shill but I think paying for O'Reilly is worth it. You get access to many books and videos outside the O'Reilly publisher. Definitely worth it, I tend to read a tech book a month (maybe 2 if it's "light.") Many of the books being suggested in the other comments are available as well (will definitely start Hands-On Rust because it seems very cool, and Practical Common Lisp shortly afterwards). Out o…

I'm curious why you pay for those services and not the others. Is it a matter of topics, teaching style?

I find the quality for frontend masters to be extremely high, over the last 4 years they've gotten workshops from people working at Netflix, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Amazon; while some of the courses have a short shelf life due to versioning issues of tech they are discussing/teaching, I tend to watch all of them when they get released.

Compare this to pluralsight, which I feel like 80% of the courses are just regurgitating the documentation back to the user very poorly, or udemy that whose courses are typically stretch to 20-40 hours when they topic barely warrants 4 hours (see any frontend course).

I like educative.io because they are the best interview prep site out there IMO, I also enjoy some of their specific topics outside of interview prep (devops, concurrency, threading, etc); what's nice about educative.io is that it's all text based, I read way faster than I can watch. Also helps that they had a really good discount a few years ago that I'm still using (something like 3 or 4 years for the price of a single year).

O'reilly is great because, as I stated elsewhere, they have an enormous collection of books not just from O'Reilly but Packt Publishing, Manning, Apress, No Starch Press; they also have decent video courses from the same publishers as well.

There are very few technical books I'm willing to buy a physical copy of, I don't live in a large space so I have limited area for the books I do have, I do however like reading technical books. I'm also grandfathered in at a previous price point, so I feel like I'm "forced" to get my moneys worth. So reading 12-15 books is the "worth it" spot for me.

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

#198

Post by taffit »

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 would also recommend "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" [1], as you are learning hands on with some practical stuff: from generating Excel-files to PDFs, from sending e-mails to work with files and folders. At the end you will have some tools to automate some of your daily tasks for real. Oh, and it's free to read as well.

[1] https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

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

#200

Post by usmannk »

mgomez wrote: post #165
usmannk wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking for golang in this thread and this is the only reference I found. Would you mind linking the Go book you reference? Thanks

Sure thing: https://lets-go-further.alexedwards.net That book is a follow-up to an easier book [1] that I also bought, but ended up skipping since I was only interested in writing JSON APIs. [1] https://lets-go.alexedwards.net

Thanks!
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