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Crafting Interpreters: A Review

chidiwilliams.com

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Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#141

Post by shanusmagnus »

thecatster wrote: post #129
shanusmagnus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These look great, and judging by other people's comments, are instances of a class of book I will poorly describe as "lovingly-crafted works of art on highly technical CS topics", a genre that I am always on the lookout for more examples of. From my own experience, some examples might be: - SICP, by Abelson and Sussman - Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Norvig By general acclaim, some examples mig…

It's not really CS, but alongside the books you have listed (I have most of those physically and as eBooks!) I absolutely adore "The Art of Electronics" as the Bible to electronics. It's definitely helped me out immensely.

That's a great example -- I know people who have that and feel a religious zeal for it. That "religious zeal about a technical / science created with art and care" book is the feeling I'm really after.

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#142

Post by auto »

munificent wrote: post #85
auto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've already spent the money on whiskey and synthesizers You know, after reading Game Programming Patterns years ago I knew I'd get CI eventually, and have only delayed because I know I don't have the time to give it what it deserves just yet (two kids under three, fulltime Senior Eng, yada yada you know the drill), but this line hits so close to home that it's getting purchased right now. Everything I've taken the…

I'm basically a walking nerd stereotype. The M8 looks so cool, but I just got a Syntakt so I definitely can't justify another groovebox.

I've got a Digitakt that I've gotten good mileage out of but know I haven't really scratched the surface of, so I haven't even let myself watch anything about the Syntakt. The M8 I got for all those times I need real portable groovebox, you know, working from home and all.

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#143

Post by vips7L »

ch4s3 wrote: post #119
62951413 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Java was a poor choice (especially without the latest improvements such as records and switch expressions): * new books should use more modern popular languages to age well and to attract younger audience * on the JVM there are languages better suited for the topic (e.g. Scala by a large margin) * There's already the "Language Implementation Patterns" book ( https://www.amazon.com/Language-Implementation-Patter…

ANTLR may be used in big data query engines but I can’t think of a single language I’ve ever used that had a parser written with it. I know you can grab off the shelf parsers with antlr for a bunch of languages, but who cares? And frankly, Scala’s build tool is way too slow and would be a slog to use for this book.

SBT and Scala are the biggest productivity killers for me at work purely based on the slow build time and lack of proper documentation. That and every release the ecosystem makes some breaking change.

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#144

Post by geekraver »

If you’ve never read it, a fun article on Bob from some years back.

https://www.wired.com/2013/01/comedy-in-the-hacker-world/amp

I was lucky enough to be working on the Dart team in Seattle at the time with Bob, who is one of the smartest, funniest and nicest people I have ever met (although the whole team was an exceptional bunch).

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#145

Post by munificent »

michael-go wrote: post #137
munificent wrote: post #48

Thank you for the excellent review! Also, I'll second the comments here: The design of your blog is beautiful.

Dear Bob, in case it helps FYI both the book's website http://craftinginterpreters.com/ and your blog https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ seem down right now. And if anyone was curious like me to see the book's website, here is a archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220616005500/http://www.crafti...

They appear to be up for me now. Not sure if it was a temporary glitch or got swamped or what.

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#146

Post by dunefox »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #53

I love this book! My only gripe is that I wish it was a whole series, no, a whole genre of books. We need more hands on, code first books that take you through 1-2 extended projects where you can type along and get working code at the end. These books should have CS theory, but still be fundamentally focused on implementation. It'd be really fun to have one of these for a more functional compiler (type checking, code…

Yeah, I'd love to read this book with a more functional language as target, and compilers as you mentioned.

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#147

Post by thecatster »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #141
thecatster wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really CS, but alongside the books you have listed (I have most of those physically and as eBooks!) I absolutely adore "The Art of Electronics" as the Bible to electronics. It's definitely helped me out immensely.

That's a great example -- I know people who have that and feel a religious zeal for it. That "religious zeal about a technical / science created with art and care" book is the feeling I'm really after.

Right, exactly: when that much care is put into a resource, I truly feel that I enjoy it more, even if the material itself might seem dry at first. Those kinds of feeling books are truly special.

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#148

Post by shanusmagnus »

thecatster wrote: post #147
shanusmagnus wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great example -- I know people who have that and feel a religious zeal for it. That "religious zeal about a technical / science created with art and care" book is the feeling I'm really after.

Right, exactly: when that much care is put into a resource, I truly feel that I enjoy it more, even if the material itself might seem dry at first. Those kinds of feeling books are truly special.

100%, which reminds me: another example of books created with incredible care are anything by Douglas Hofstadter. The canonical example is Goedel, Escher, Bach; but one that I think is super under-rated is Le Ton beau de Marot -- not only does he care about the content, but the page layout, the font, everything. Truly a labor of love and obsession.

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#149

Post by jsshah »

sg47 wrote: post #75
Derbasti wrote: post #35

Without a doubt one of the best technical books I have ever read. To me, it was a missing piece of the big puzzle of "how do computers work". I read many a book to answer this question, and came away with three books: - CODE by Charles Petzold explains the CPU - Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Arpaci-Dusseau explain OSes - Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom explains programming languages Masterfully done…

Any defining book for databases? I'm interested in going deeper into the query planner and indexes.

Database Internals by Alex Petrov

If you are into videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjbohkNBWQs_...

Re: Crafting Interpreters: A Review

#150

Post by zem »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #93
Derbasti wrote: post #35

Without a doubt one of the best technical books I have ever read. To me, it was a missing piece of the big puzzle of "how do computers work". I read many a book to answer this question, and came away with three books: - CODE by Charles Petzold explains the CPU - Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Arpaci-Dusseau explain OSes - Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom explains programming languages Masterfully done…

These look great, and judging by other people's comments, are instances of a class of book I will poorly describe as "lovingly-crafted works of art on highly technical CS topics", a genre that I am always on the lookout for more examples of. From my own experience, some examples might be: - SICP, by Abelson and Sussman - Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Norvig By general acclaim, some examples mig…

"Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming", by Van Roy and Haridi
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