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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?

#101

Post by halkony »

twawaaay wrote: post #51

My favourite is "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel ( https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ ) Not only is the book free to read (although I would suggest to pay for it if you like it!) The code to parse binary files actually "inspired" my design of an actual production application which was very flexible, succinct and, most importantly, so fast I had to spend a lot of effort convincing people the numbers are actually tru…

I've been learning lisp this past week. I think I get the main idea of "code is data and data is code", but I struggle to understand how it's more powerful than, say, making a function factory in Python.

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

#102

Post by culopatin »

intelVISA wrote: post #93
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…

Thinking of building something along those lines i.e. you can peek ahead if you really get stuck. Proj-based learning is really fun to both create and consume imo.

If it helps you in any way, what I try to do is to use a tutorial book to build my own app. For example a Flask tutorial that shows how to build a blog app, but I’m building a library. I still learn about the Flask way and I learn some building blocks but I have to figure out the equivalent for what I want to do. I often get stuck though.

So maybe showing the building blocks and letting you use them for something. You could perhaps show 2 or 3 suggested projects that are built with the building blocks. You show the generic version of the blocks, and then you figure out how to tweak them to make one of the 2 or 3 suggested projects.

Sort of buying the legos and then showing what you could do with them. But building it is up to you.

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

#103

Post by adolph »

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…

Came here to mention just that book. It is excellent.

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

#104

Post by mprovost »

ajoseps wrote: post #34

This book is still in progress but I've gone through some of the chapters and have enjoyed it. Rust from the Ground Up: https://leanpub.com/rust-from-the-ground-up I was looking for a book that had offline projects I can work on while on flights, and this book focuses on rebuilding linux utilities using rust. The other nice part is that you get a better understanding of linux internals. I believe the author is also r…

Thanks for the kind words! I'm desperately polishing the next chapter for publication...

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

#105

Post by cardanome »

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…

One thing that helps me a lot when learning new languages is to NOT copy and paste but actually re-type the code.

You will be forced to read more carefully and, more importantly, you will make typing mistakes. Hunting down your own mistake will teach you the subtleties of the syntax as well as further increase your understanding of the code.

For more advanced programmers, there is also the challenge of translating the code into another language entirely, which requires a actual semantic understanding of the code.

Also once the project is done, adding small additional bonus features will further deepen your understanding.

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

#106

Post by RomanPushkin »

Shameless plug:

FREE https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun - Ruby Is For Fun, I made the book so you do a lot of exercise. There is around 80 exercises in total.

Rewritten as a course:

https://www.educative.io/courses/handbook-ruby-developers

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

#108

Post by ajoseps »

mprovost wrote: post #104
ajoseps wrote: post #34

This book is still in progress but I've gone through some of the chapters and have enjoyed it. Rust from the Ground Up: https://leanpub.com/rust-from-the-ground-up I was looking for a book that had offline projects I can work on while on flights, and this book focuses on rebuilding linux utilities using rust. The other nice part is that you get a better understanding of linux internals. I believe the author is also r…

Thanks for the kind words! I'm desperately polishing the next chapter for publication...

great to see you on HN as well! I haven't revisited the book in a while but I really liked the chapters I did work on. I have another flight coming up soon so maybe I'll try another chapter :)

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

#109

Post by oidar »

theshrike79 wrote: post #3

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.

Any alternative to this? I think lego stopped making it.
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