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What are some books where the reader learns by building one project? Ask HN (Summarized)

by MD HalimFebruary 17th, 2017

Too Long; Didn't Read

A HN user recently posted this question on HackerNews and it got more than 600 upvotes. Some of the books mentioned in the comments were already very popular and well known. But, a lot of them are rare but still worth their weight in Gold.

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featured image - What are some books where the reader learns by building one project? Ask HN (Summarized)

With so many links to different blogs/books covering a range of programming languages, I decided to sort them categorically and add a brief summary of each book with links to their free as well as paid version.

Computer Science

From NAND to Tetris Building a Modern Computer From First Principles

The Elements of Computing Systems / Nisan & Schocken_Building a Modern Computer From First Principles_www.nand2tetris.org

The site contains all the software tools and project materials necessary to build a general-purpose computer system from the ground up. They also provide a set of lectures designed to support a typical course on the subject.

The materials are aimed at students, instructors, and self-learners. Everything is free and open-source. There is an associated course on Coursera as well https://www.coursera.org/course/nand2tetris1

Why Bother? Because many CS students don’t understand how computers work; because fewer and fewer students take compilation courses; because many computer architecture courses are too detailed and too dry; because nothing beats the thrill of creating something from almost nothing; because Nand2Tetris engages students in implementing some of the coolest algorithms, data structures and techniques in applied computer science, and because the typical student feedback in Nand2Tetris courses is “the best course I ever took”.

Compiler Construction Using Java

Compiler Construction Using Java, JavaCC, and Yacc_Edit description_www.amazon.com

The book will teach you how to write a grammar then write a parser from it then eventually be able to improve it as you go on reading and doing the exercises. It was a great moment when I feel comfortable writing recursive functions since grammars are composed of recursive functions. You’ll also learn a nice way on how you can get your compiler to generate assembly code. Another feature of the book is the chapter on Finite Automata wherein you’ll learn how to convert between regular expressions, regular grammars and finite automata and eventually write your own ‘grep’ which was for me is a mind-blowing experience. There are lots of other stuffs in this book that you could learn. Thank you Anthony J. Dos Reis for writing great books for people like me.

Modern Compiler Implementation in ML by Andrew Appel

Modern Compiler Implementation in C_Edit description_www.cs.princeton.edu

This book is one of the most seminal books for Compiler Design. It’s one of the most common textbook used in Undergraduate Computer Science courses. It walks you through all the elements of a Compiler and teaches you how to build one in C.

Crafting Interpreters

Crafting Interpreters_This book contains everything you need to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You'll learn both…_www.craftinginterpreters.com

This book contains everything you need to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You’ll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused. It’s gonna be a blast.

Starting from main(), you’ll build a language that features rich syntax, dynamic typing, garbage collection, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance. All packed into a few thousand lines of clean, fast code that you will thoroughly understand because you wrote each one yourself.

You can read the whole book, for free online on the link given above.

Some of the remarks left by HN readers!

CODE The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, by Charles Petzold_Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software is a unique exploration into bits, bytes, and the inner…_www.charlespetzold.com

“Code”, which takes the reader on a journey from shining flash lights to communicate with your neighbor, all the way to bridging the gap between boolean algebra and building a relay.

The Little Schemer

The Little Schemer_Matthias Felleisen is Trustee Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, recipient of the Karl V…_mitpress.mit.edu

The Little Schemer introduces computing as an extension of arithmetic and algebra; things that everyone studies in grade school and high school. It introduces programs as recursive functions and briefly discusses the limits of what computers can do. The authors use the programming language Scheme, and interesting foods to illustrate these abstract ideas.

Linux

Linux From Scratch

LFS Project Homepage_Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own customized…_www.linuxfromscratch.org

LFS teaches people how a Linux system works internallyBuilding LFS teaches you about all that makes Linux tick, how things work together and depend on each other. And most importantly, how to customize it to your own tastes and needs.

Building LFS produces a very compact Linux systemWhen you install a regular distribution, you often end up installing a lot of programs that you would probably never use. They’re just sitting there taking up (precious) disk space. It’s not hard to get an LFS system installed under 100 MB. Does that still sound like a lot? A few of us have been working on creating a very small embedded LFS system. We installed a system that was just enough to run the Apache web server; total disk space usage was approximately 8 MB. With further stripping, that can be brought down to 5 MB or less. Try that with a regular distribution.

What can I do with my LFS system?

A by-the-book LFS system is fairly minimal, but is designed to provide a strong base on which you can add any packages you want. See the BLFS project for a selection of commonly used packages.

Programming from the Ground Up by Jonathan Bartlett

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Ground-Up-Jonathan-Bartlett/dp/0975283847

Programming from the Ground Up_This book teaches assembly language for x86 processors and the GNU/Linux operating system. Therefore we will be giving…_programminggroundup.blogspot.in

This book teaches x86 assembler from first principles.

Most introductory books on programming frustrate me to no end. At the end of them you can still ask “how does the computer really work?” and not have a good answer. They tend to pass over topics that are difficult even though they are important. I will take you through the difficult issues because that is the only way to move on to masterful programming. My goal is to take you from knowing nothing about programming to understanding how to think, write, and learn like a programmer. You won’t know everything, but you will have a background for how everything fits together

Software Engineering

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software 1st Edition

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software_Edit description_www.amazon.com

The classical Design Patterns book has a first chapter which takes you through the design of a text editor using the patterns provided in the book. If what you do is read the chapter and then the patterns referenced as you go and build the text editor based on their design you get exactly the sort of thing you are looking for. Its a different way of doing it than the entire book but arguably just in a different format for what is otherwise a reference book.

Docker

Orchestrating Docker by Shrikrishna Holla

Orchestrating Docker | PACKT Books_Manage and deploy Docker services to containerize applications efficiently_www.packtpub.com

It teaches Docker concepts with a single project, and as you progress through chapters, you will find different ways you can deploy applications using Docker containers.

Distributed Systems for System Architects

Distributed Systems for System Architects | Paulo Veríssimo | Springer_The primary audience for this book are advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Computer architecture, as…_www.springer.com

It follows a case study of a fictional company that wanted to implement a distributed system, but the level of detail and technical complexity it covers is just mind boggling.

Nim in Action

Manning | Nim in Action_Edit description_www.manning.com

Instead of working on a single project, most chapters have a little project (for example a chat CLI app or a Twitter-like website) which teaches you different things about Nim.

Nim in Action introduces the Nim programming language and teaches you to write native software applications and libraries, web applications, embedded device software, and programs that communicate over the internet. This book is full of hands-on examples that help you learn how to test, debug, document, and package your Nim applications. You?ll also discover how to interface with foreign languages such as C and C++ and how to use metaprogramming features to write domain specific languages. Throughout this book you will implement a fully-functioning chat server, a Twitter clone, and many other software projects. By the time you finish reading, you’ll have a solid knowledge of Nim and will be able to use it to write powerful, portable and efficient applications.

Ruby On Rails

RUBY ON RAILS TUTORIAL (RAILS 5) : Learn Web Development with Rails by Michael Hartl

Ruby on Rails Tutorial (Rails 5)_Newly updated for Rails 5, the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book and screencast series teach you how to develop and deploy…_www.railstutorial.org

Michael Hartl is one of the most prominent advocate for Ruby On Rails. His tutorials has been widely quoted as one of the best starting point for people learning to code or those new to web development.There is a wide number of pricing options to choose from but the good part is that the book is still available for you to read for free online.

It’ll run you through building a Twitter clone and introduce you to git, heroku, a bit of CSS/HTML, and even goes into AJAX a bit.

Lisp

Practical Common Lisp

Practical Common Lisp_This page, and the pages it links to, contain text of the Common Lisp book Practical Common Lisp published by Apress…_www.gigamonkeys.com

Filter spam, Parse binary files, catalog MP3s, stream MP3s over a network, and provide a Web interface for the MP3 catalog and server.

Erlang

Erlang and OTP in Action

Manning | Erlang and OTP in Action_Erlang and OTP in Action teaches you the concepts of concurrent programming and the use of Erlang's message-passing…_www.manning.com

You build an application with increasing complexity. There are some other applications that are built along the way to demonstrate some ideas in a smaller scope, but the overall structure of the book is designed around making one application better as you learn more about OTP.

Python

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python_In Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, you'll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what…_automatetheboringstuff.com

The title of the book is self-explanatory. I personally enjoyed reading this book and writing the cool scripts that Al wrote about in this awesome book.

In Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, you’ll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand-no prior programming experience required. Once you’ve mastered the basics of programming, you’ll create Python programs that effortlessly perform useful and impressive feats of automation to:

Search for text in a file or across multiple files

Create, update, move, and rename files and folders

Search the Web and download online content

Update and format data in Excel spreadsheets of any size

Split, merge, watermark, and encrypt PDFs

Send reminder emails and text notifications

Fill out online forms

Step-by-step instructions walk you through each program, and practice projects at the end of each chapter challenge you to improve those programs and use your newfound skills to automate similar tasks.

Django

**Test-Driven Development in Python by Harry Percival**Available for free

Test-Driven Development with Python_Test-Driven Development with Python focuses on web development, with some coverage of JavaScript (inescapable for any…_chimera.labs.oreilly.com

Test-Driven Development with Python focuses on web development, with some coverage of JavaScript (inescapable for any web programmer). This book uses a concrete example — the development of a website, from scratch — to teach the TDD metholology, and how it applies to web programming, from the basics of database integration and javascript, going via browser-automation tools like Selenium, to advanced (and trendy) topics like NoSQL, websockets and Async programming.

Tango With Django

Django Book: How to Tango with Django: A Python Django Tutorial_Edit description_www.tangowithdjango.com

The final project is a Django webapp that allows visitors to add sites and rank them. Many different aspects in Django are looked at, as well as beyond, such as CSS, Bootstrap, search, Jquery, AJAX, etc.

The Official Django Tutorial

Writing your first Django app, part 1 | Django documentation | Django_This tutorial is written for Django 1.10 and Python 3.4 or later. If the Django version doesn't match, you can refer to…_docs.djangoproject.com

Walks you through creating a polling website.

Flask

Flask The Mega Tutorial

The Flask Mega-Tutorial, Part I: Hello, World! - miguelgrinberg.commiguelgrinberg.comblog.miguelgrinberg.com

The application that is developed as part of this tutorial is a decently featured microblogging server similar to Twitter.

Some of the topics covered are:

User management, including managing logins, sessions, user roles, profiles and user avatars.

Database management, including migration handling.

Web form support, including field validation.

Pagination of long lists of items.

Full text search.

Email notifications to users.

HTML templates.

Support for multiple languages.

Caching and other performance optimizations.

Debugging techniques for development and production servers.

Installation on a production server.

JavaScript

Eloquent Javascript

Eloquent JavaScript_Illustrations by various artists: Cover by Wasif Hyder. Computer (introduction) and unicycle people (Chapter 21) by Max…_eloquentjavascript.net

A great book for an introduction to programming.

This is one of the most seminal book ever written for Javascript. As the title suggests, the author explains every topic eloquently and walk you through lots of code.

You build 5 projects through the book — a programming language, paint program, a dom game and a skill sharing website using node js.

React

SurviveJS_Want to learn Webpack or React? Get started for free and build a Kanban board by following the example project._survivejs.com

This online tutorial walk you through React+Webpack and teaches you how to build a small Kanban/Trello webapp.

The Road To Learning React

GitHub - rwieruch/the-road-to-learn-react_Contribute to the-road-to-learn-react development by creating an account on GitHub._github.com

A free guide on github by Robin Wieruch’s which teaches you how to build a HackerNews like app from scratch.

GO

Web Development with Go

https://www.usegolang.com

From the author’s comment on HN:

Web Development with Go (see https://www.usegolang.com) is based on starting with pretty minimal Go and web development experience and walking you through the process of building a complete web application.

I find this approach works well because you don’t have to ask “why did he make that design decision” but instead I intentionally make common mistakes a beginner would make, wait until they become an issue, and then I demonstrate how we can fix that issue. As a result you really get to understand not only how to create a web app in Go but also why developers tend to follow different design patterns.

I said this in another comment, but it is based on Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial. I think showing someone how to go from nothing to a full app is a great way to help them get into web development without the frustration that comes from piecing together blog posts/docs/trial&error.

The Web Devlopment with Golang: The Anti-textbook

GitHub - thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook: Learn how to write webapps without a framework…_web-dev-golang-anti-textbook - Learn how to write webapps without a framework in Go._github.com

You can learn how to build a todo list manager in Go.

This book is about building a webapp from scratch without using any framework.

Miscellaneous

Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers

http://greenteapress.com/thinkstats/

Here, you learn statistics by implementing statistics functions in Python along the way and use them to solve the questions in the book.

Discover Meteor

Discover Meteor - Learn how to build real-time JavaScript web apps with the Meteor.js framework_Learn Meteor and build faster & simpler web apps, as we teach you how to build a real-time Meteor app from scratch._www.discovermeteor.com

Walks you through building a Reddit clone called Microscope(a reduced version of an actual product Telescope).

Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7

Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7_Inform 7 has continued to evolve in the years since the book's first publication. Some exciting new features have been…_inform7.textories.com

This book walks you through building a complete (and fairly sophisticated) text adventure. Inform 7 is very much a niche programming language, but it’s really interesting and unusual, well worth investigating if you want to broaden your horizons. Vaguely Prolog-like, but written in natural language.

The Better Explained Guide To Calculus

Calculus, Better Explained eBook + Video Course_I was too. Despite years of classes, I didn't have a strong understanding of calculus concepts. Sure, I could follow…_betterexplained.com

Kalid basically iterates the series around the concept of deriving the formula for the area/perimeter of a circle, and then builds up to deriving the surface area/volume of a sphere. The focus throughout is the building up of an intuition of calculus before leaping into formulas. Even with uni-level calculus, I did strengthen my intuition of what’s going on by reading through his book.

It’s pretty fun, and I actually spent some time visualizing the calculus of geometric solids afterward i.e http://www.trinco.io/blog/derivative-of-x3

Hand Made Hero by Casey Muratori

Handmade Hero_Yes! Windows will be the first platform, since it is currently the most common gaming platform, but the series will…_handmadehero.org

Not a book but i’s Handmade Hero series is really interesting. It’s a from scratch tutorial on building game in C on windows but delves into many interesting programming topic that would be useful outside game development.

Hacking the Xbox by Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang.

(http://hackingthexbox.com/)

The book is free and can be downloaded online.

It goes from adding the LED to the Xbox to tapping the security mechanism. Plus, the original Xbox is cheap nowadays too, so you won’t have to shell out a lot of money doing it. Local craigslist should have plenty of them.