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

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 true.

It taught me some important lessons about how you can achieve performance with Lisp languages and the real reasons for the power of macros. Not too shabby for the first book on Lisp I red!

I thought the little projects you build along the way struck a good balance of interest, e.g. you're building a snake game by section 2 (but crucially you've already been exposed to how to think about data so you're not just dropped into the deep end with some boilerplate to fiddle with).

Anyway, i could write tons of praise for this book but it's convinced me to ditch python for teaching newbies and i LOVED python for getting newbies started real quick with projects for years.

The chapters are structured so you are building 2 projects at once. One where you follow along with the chapter material with example code and explanations. And a second in the exercises.

I really like it because it introduces the concepts in the context of a project, but you can't get stuck because the code is there too. Then you need to really apply it in the exercises on your own project, without the example code.