What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?

Not quite what you're talking about but the best book on car mechanics I ever read... It was red, and textbook-sized, hardcover. Lots of drawings.

It literally started with an explosion in a can, and then progressively enhanced that idea step-by-step: add a lid to the can to capture the energy, add a lever to keep the can lid from flying away, and then attach the lever to a wheel so that it returns the lid to the top of the can for another explosion, add walls to guide the lid, ta-da! Piston.

It goes on like that, adding each piece of the puzzle in a logical way, until you have a mental model of an internal combustion engine. You definitely feel like you could build one from scratch (if you had the metallurgy skill.)

Not a book, but if you're looking to learn modern SQL in a hands-on way, I created Mastery with SQL (masterywithsql.com) specifically because I was frustrated with traditional SQL (and PostgreSQL) content that's lacking in high quality and challenging exercises.

Mastery with SQL has over 150 exercises, ranging from easy to very difficult, where you're primarily working with a single database and trying to answer interesting questions about a business (which months saw the highest revenue, best sales employee, most watched movie, find missing records, etc.).

I spent an enormous amount of time working on the exercises for this course (more than the actual content itself) and people who take the course consistently tell me working through the problems helped them learn SQL more deeply than they've learned anywhere else.

I know you specifically asked for books, but I think these are too good to not mention.

Ben Eater has a series of Youtube videos that explores how computers work, starting from first principles, and in the process you build an 8 bit computer (or a 6502 computer in a different series). He actually sells kits of the parts to build it yourself, or you can buy the parts yourself.

It’s a deep dive into how computers work, but it’s very approachable. He’s an excellent teacher, and the video format works really well for what he’s teaching - it’s hard to imagine this working as well in book form.

Build an 8-bit computer from scratch: https://eater.net/8bit Build a 6502 computer: https://eater.net/6502 Let’s build a video card: https://eater.net/vga

I’ve watched a bunch of these videos in the past few weeks and I’ve learned so much from them. I can’t recommend them enough.

Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan and Schocken has you 'build' a computer from basic logic gates to CPU/Memory to assembler, VM, etc. all the way to a running program.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

I found Paradigms of AI Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigms_of_AI_Programming) an amazing book to work through.

It takes you through implementing some classic AI examples (such as Eliza) and teaches you how to write code in a data-first style through Lisp.

I worked through the whole thing building it in Clojure and learnt loads (not just about AI, but about writing readable code in general). I can't recommend it highly enough!

I've been making my way through "Writing an Intepreter in Go" and "Writing a compiler in Go" https://interpreterbook.com/

The Go stuff is really just a means to an end, the real value comes from the practical learnings of how to build a functioning interpreter and compiler (and virtual machine!) for a programming language the author made up called Monkey.

It's not a book full of theory but it lays some nice foundations that might help you understand the theory better :)

Ray Tracing in a Weekend(https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.ht...) is an incredible guide to work through to write a basic functioning ray tracer.

Shameless plug

My book on WebGL2 (500+ pages) takes you from understanding the rendering pipeline, WebGL2 API, etc. and progressively walks the reader by building a feature-rich 3D graphics engine in WebGL2 (ES6) that includes cameras, lights, shaders, post processing, OBJ models, etc. with a final project of a 3D virtual car showroom.

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-interactive-...

Initiative: A Proven Method to Bring Your Passions to Life (and Work) https://www.amazon.com/Initiative-Proven-Method-Bring-Passio...

Here's a video of the author (me) interviewing a reader who did all the exercises, in the process going from (his words) below middle management to creating his dream project with his dream business partner https://youtu.be/zfV3yNKp0h8. The process costs nearly nothing in money and creates more time for his family.

Here are written reviews from NYU students and clients who took the project-based class the book is based on http://joshuaspodek.com/this-is-one-of-the-greatest-classes-....

If anyone has questions, I'm happy to answer here or by email. If anyone is interested but cost gets in the way, email me also and I'll try to work something out.

The entire book Structure and Intrerpretation of Computer Programs is like that. It explains how to implement the language Scheme in any language (by decomposing the problem to small enough atomic entities you can implement and combine them in any language). I suppose it’s excellent practice since the book uses only Scheme, so the reader must implement the primitives of the interpreter themselves. So you need to figure out how to implement tiny things yourself (which is fun) and then goes on to show how those combine together into a wonderfull whole.

A Curios Moon - a data science mystery that teaches you PostgreSQL by working on projects that use real nasa data sets in a fictional setting (your role as a data science intern at red:4)

https://bigmachine.io/products/a-curious-moon/

My book from O'Reilly ("Building Tools with GitHub") builds a variety of applications using the GitHub API in five different languages (Ruby, JavaScript, Python, C#, Java on Android). All the chapters build a complete project (app on Android for writing blogs with Jekyll for example).

You can buy it or read it free online (thanks again to O'Reilly for allowing us to release it under creative commons):

https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/

No prior experience with the languages are required, so it is good for a beginner wanting to dip their toes into that language and/or facet of the API.

Elm in Action is that way.

Over the course of the book you build a photo sharing application from scratch. Each chapter uses new "feature requests" from a fictional manager as a way to introduce and teach new Elm concepts.

https://www.manning.com/books/elm-in-action?a_aid=elm_in_act...

(It's technically in Early Access because the print book hasn't hit the shelves yet, but all the chapters are finished and available in the online version.)

* The Rails Tutorial - https://www.railstutorial.org/

This book (although an older edition) is largely what got me into programming, and taught me so much about Rails.

* Programming WebAssembly with Rust - https://pragprog.com/book/khrust/programming-webassembly-wit...

This book steps through learning about web assembly, writing it by hand, and then implementing a server for webassembly. I had so many misconceptions about webassembly/wasm before reading this.

Some good ones I don't see yet, which I like because they very much follow the organic path you might follow doing things incrementally, rather than presenting everything full-blown.

How to Make an RPG - Build a retro-style JRPG from scratch

https://howtomakeanrpg.com/

Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages by Jamis Buck - covers a whole gamut of different maze generation algorithms. This author also has a great book on doing a raytracer step by step.

https://www.amazon.com/Mazes-Programmers-Twisty-Little-Passa...

Rough Cut--Woodworking with Tommy Mac: 12 Step-by-Step Projects - very nice beginning woodworking book.

https://www.amazon.com/Rough-Cut-Woodworking-Tommy-Step-Step...

The Inform (6) Beginner's Guide - introduces the Inform 6 interactive fiction language through three successive text adventure games

https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/IBG.pdf

There’s the Gingery book series that starts by describing how to build a charcoal foundry and goes all the way to a complete machine shop.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

There are some really cool projects in the "500 Lines or Less"[0] book which is a part of the "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" series.

[0]: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html

I'm currently writing a book for PragProg called Building Distributed Services with Go (though it mostly applies to other languages too) that's walks you through building a distributed database from scratch. You can sign up on this mailing list to know when it's available: https://travisjeffery.us4.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1e3ff7....

- Practical Common Lisp

- Land of Lisp - http://landoflisp.com/ - watch the video, it's hilarious

- Build Your Own Lisp - http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ - Learn C by creating a lisp in C

- In the spirit of making your own lisp, I would recommend https://github.com/kanaka/mal - learn any language, by making a lisp in that language

NAND to Tetris?

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

- Automate boring stuff with Python: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

- Elements of Computing Systems (Building a computer from scratch on a hardware simulator): https://www.nand2tetris.org/book

I don't know if linking to one's own work is considered gauche here, but since it fits with the original question, my own book Practical Microservices fits this description (https://pragprog.com/book/egmicro/practical-microservices). It takes the reader from inception of a projection to a functioning system, explaining the basics of microservices, event sourcing, and CQRS along the way. Each chapter builds on the previous ones.

My own free, open-source Computer Graphics book guides you through building both a raytracer and a rasterizer: https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch

Soon to become a real book published by No Starch Press!

Disclaimer: This is a book I wrote.

Building Machine Learning Powered Applications walks you through building an ML application end-to-end, from product idea to a (simple) deployed version.

The free first chapter is available here https://mlpowered.com/book/

The github is at https://github.com/hundredblocks/ml-powered-applications

I don’t know if it’s alright to mention my own work, but the book I wrote to teach React is project-based. It’s got a bunch of very small projects and exercises rather than a single massive one, and the later projects review concepts from the earlier ones. It’s called Pure React and it’s digital-only right now (maybe one day I’ll get it printed!) https://daveceddia.com/pure-react/

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...

From binary to a full computer

I maintain a blog that teaches readers how to implement toy versions of big projects in C++ at https://littlebigprojects.io. I hope to eventually cover distributed systems and compilers.

In my compilers class we used a book that my professor wrote that takes you through all the steps and algorithms for making a compiler for a c like language. You can find it online for free at: https://www3.nd.edu/~dthain/compilerbook/

I really like this book because it really takes you through all the steps. However, it's very readable and provides great examples of how to actually implement some of the components.

I also like it because it explains how to use tools like Yacc and Bison, while explaining how they work underneath and the motivation for using such tools.

I leaned on this book heavily in the class where the main assignment was writing our own compiler from scratch in C, and I'm currently using it now to make a compiler in rust for a custom language.

For Rust, try Rust in Action https://www.manning.com/books/rust-in-action.

It has several worked examples, including a key/value append-only database, a CPU emulator, an NTP client, a floating point implementation, multiple graphical applications, a binary files inspector and a few others!

"Deep Learning for Programmers: Interactive Programming for Artificial Intelligence"

https://aiprobook.com/deep-learning-for-programmers/

For Flask there's https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/.

It's a 20+ video course where you build a real world SAAS app. We build up 1 big app through out the course.

There's also 30-40+ hours worth of self guided optional assignments to add features into the application based on what you learn in each section. It's all positioned in the form of specifications, similar to how it would be when doing any type of job or contract gig.

Funny enough, many people have contacted me saying they took the course but don't even use Python and Flask. They were just experienced programmers using other web frameworks but wanted to see how the app all comes together so they can use the same patterns in their framework of choice.

A series of blog posts to write an OS from scratch in Rust: https://os.phil-opp.com/

I liked "Deep Learning and the Game of Go" (by Max Pumperla and Kevin Ferguson). You actually create an AI Go player, one which may not be quite on the level of AlphaGo, but one that is probably better than any traditional min-max based player that was the state of the art until recently.

I wrote Nim days: https://xmonader.github.io/nimdays you will find redis parser, redis clients, webframework, assets bundler, tcp router, terminaltables, .. and more

Also I love Real World Haskell and Practical Common Lisp

"A Boy and A Battery" (1942), Yates.

There was a whole series, "A Boy and a Motor", "The Boy's Guide to Gas Engines", etc. How to build your own toys if you have few tools but the skills of a master machinist.

Physically Based Rendering is basically a complete guide to building a modern physically based rendering engine (it even won an Academy Award)

https://pbrt.org/

Embedded Systems: Introduction to Arm® Cortex™-M Microcontrollers

It's a pretty good introduction to embedded programming, with several projects included. Valvano's course at University of Texas is also available as a MOOC.

Ray Wenderlich books on mobile development. His site started as basic tutorials for iOS dev and has grown to cover other mobile development, unity, server-side swift and more. It is all project-based. The books are great and the website has a lot of good free content.

https://store.raywenderlich.com/

The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand by Darrell Mullis

With this book you a build a business from nothing, and in the process you learn: The mechanics of Balance Sheet, P/L Statement and Cash flow Statement. (My initial motivation was to understand these statements, inorder to have a better understanding of the companies I want to invest in)

Elements of Euclid ? You build the proofs in your head step by step.

not sure if this fits the bill but Car Hacker's Handbook by OpenGarages http://opengarages.org/handbook/ helped me to understand CAN, the ECU, and mess with my car in ways I never thought possible. The security lesson is an added bonus.

Hope it’s cool to link our own stuff ?

I’m writing one right now on building a mini trading bot platform.

It would be great to hear what you like/dislike in these types of books.

I don’t have any marketing website up at the moment but I created this mailing list if you’re interested in following the developments http://bit.ly/tradingbotplatformbook

(Link redirects to https://cdn.forms-content.sg-form.com/f306b813-475c-11ea-9be...)

Thorsten Ball's Writing An Interpreter In Go.

A fantastically written technical book that walks through writing an interpreter for a simple programming language. It's test driven and a great introduction to the core concepts. Also a good book to get hands on with idiomatic Go code.

https://interpreterbook.com/

Thorsten does a great job talking about the concepts in the book in this Go Time podcast: https://changelog.com/gotime/107

https://interpreterbook.com/

https://compilerbook.com/

I <3 these books. They're very well written, and I recommend them every time this question comes up. I also have https://github.com/cweagans/awesome-diy-software, which is similar to the project-based-learning link that you posted.

https://beautifulracket.com

Black Hat Go -- Excellent book!

Python Crash Course [1]

This book is especially good for beginners in python, it feels as if the author is teaching you in person. All the exercises in every chapter builds to a mini project by the end of that chapter. One can skip the basics section and jump into the projects section which has: Alien Invasion (game programming with pygame), Data Visualization, and Web Development (using Django).

[1] https://nostarch.com pythoncrashcourse2e

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, where the reader implements a Lisp

Lots of interesting (smaller) projects in D Cookbook:

https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/d-cookbook

More substantial is the Linux from scratch series:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Adventure in Prolog by Dennis Merritt teaches you different features of Prolog in a step-by-step manner while developing a game.

Refactoring by Martin Fowler.

He takes you through a piece of code and refactors it all into smaller and more usable parts explaining what he's doing along the way. He does this with two difference pieces of code, if I recall correctly, then the third part is an index of all possible refactors.

I read it cover to cover in less than a week and has totally changed the way I program.

Already mentioned in the first thread, but "Crafting Interpreters" is excellent.

In the first half of the book you write an interpreter for a simple scripting language; in the second half of the book, you write compiler to bytecode + vm.

Very clear, fun, excellent writing. Highly recommended.

It was also kind of amazing to very quickly have something that ran more quickly than python!

Shameless self-promotion. We have a book on deep reinforcement learning that is completely project based in Python: https://www.manning.com/books/deep-reinforcement-learning-in...

Clojure for the Brave and True is a very fun project-based book. As someone who struggles getting through technical books, I found this one a real joy and it kept my attention to the very end.

https://www.braveclojure.com/

Manning - Getting MEAN with Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node https://www.amazon.com/Getting-MEAN-Mongo-Express-Angular/dp... This one is really good if you want to do a fullstack application using MEAN stack.

Programming Game AI By Example

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Example-Wordware-Develope...

From Python to Numpy

https://www.labri.fr/perso/nrougier/from-python-to-numpy/

A book teaching Numpy vectorization.

Some years ago I was learning Ruby on Rails with the book 'Agile Web Development with Rails', that was a project-based book, and it seems to be released with an update for the recent versions of Rails.

Data Science Bookcamp: 10 Python Projects

https://www.manning.com/books/data-science-bookcamp

Apart from books, if you are open to tutorials, videos too, there was a similar thread 2 years ago about write/build your own projects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591918. That has some already mentioned here but also others (build your own react, sinatra, redux created your own programming language, editor, make a lisp etc). Both threads are now in my fav....hopefully some day.

Hope not too off topic, does anyone have books on building simple electric-powered machines? I often have ideas for little machines for my garden or cooking but have no idea how to go about selecting motors, controller boards, designing strong enough parts for my 3D printer, etc. I'm not expecting an all inclusive book for such a deep topic. A series or several books would be much appreciated!

Used to love building robots with Legos as a teenager, but alas the real world isn't so simple. ;)

I've written an intro to writing webapps in Go

https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo...

Intro to python:

https://github.com/thewhitetulip/build-app-with-python-antit...

Both are project based

Although I still use it professionally in some projects, I got over the fullstack JS some time ago.

Now half way through this Phoenix book:

https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix14/programming-phoenix-1-4

Learning Elixir/Erlang/OTP has been a joy so far. It's a new and exciting world in the middle of so much js fatigue.

Manning has an early access book in the works, "Data Science Bookcamp: 10 Python Projects"

"...you'll test and build your knowledge of Python and learn to handle the kind of open-ended problems that professional data scientists work on daily."

https://www.manning.com/books/data-science-bookcamp

While AngularJS is outdated, this book helped me understand how these frameworks do their job behind the scenes:

https://teropa.info/build-your-own-angular/

Also, thank you for posting this question, these are the kind of books that I yearn for when I want to understand how something works!

Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests is a bit old, but still a very nice book to read: https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guid...

I have created a couple of courses to learn web development from scratch by actually working on a project.

https://www.learnwithcoder.com/

It has currently Golang, Clojure & Clojurescript single page application development courses.

books by this author: http://cs.newpaltz.edu/~dosreist/

Assembly Language and Computer Architecture Using C++ and Java , Course Technology, 2004

Compiler Construction Using Java, JavaCC, and Yacc, IEEE/Wiley, 2012

Whats the best book for learning about electronics, soldering, pcbs, fpga... m looking for something more project based rather than here is 500 pages of theory and some illustrations (like most of the books outhere) better if start slow (with protoboards) and ends with fpgas.

My Splash of Code book teaches JavaScript to absolute beginners by walking them through some type-in generative art projects. People really seem to enjoy it, especially non-developers who are a little technical, such as designers, scrum masters, and product owners.

Splash of Code by Joel Dare

I can recommend https://www.railstutorial.org/book for Ruby on Rails. It's practical and concise and there's not a lot of unnecessary fluff.

i find that cpu based ray tracing is a good low-to-moderate effort project, specifically if you are getting into a new programming language f.e. lisp/modern-c++/rust/erlang(^^)/...

there are plenty of books around which can walk you through the whole thing, however, of late, i have found that this: https://pragprog.com/book/jbtracer/the-ray-tracer-challenge is a pretty comprehensive.

check it out !

approximately, on the same lines, nand-to-tetris is _very_ good as well.

Hi Shosty123, thanks for mentioning my book! Really appreciate the love (:

VERY interested in "Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications"

I noticed that it was released Sept 2018. That's not too old, but I'm curious if there's a more up-to-date version.

I wrote "get programming with JavaScript next" the whole "get programming" series ends each unit with a let's build a project to encapsulate all these ideas.

Definitely the https://www.railstutorial.org/ to learn Rails, Ruby, and web development.

Cremdhaw’s ‘Let’s Build a Compiler!’

https://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/

The Realm of Racket.

https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

DIY Furniture: A Step-by-Step Guide

builderbook.org

Frank Luna's Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11 is an underrated gem in the genre. I was surprised when I saw Microsoft recently recommending it to people to learn D3D11 before they jump into D3D12.

It doesn't actually cover game programming per-se, it's more of an introduction to 3d graphics programming book, but each chapter builds upon the last and there are assignments at the end of each chapter that allow you to play around with concepts that he walks you through so you can build a good understanding.

I've seen other books that are often recommended, and they're great by themselves, and they are nowhere near as utilitarian as this book. I cannot recommend them to beginners even if they're marketed as such.

By the end of it, you have a very good handle on a variety of concepts that you can readily apply towards, say, building a modern-day PBR pipeline.

It was my first exposure to spaced repetition learning, before I knew such a thing existed.

I believe one reason buying books is so popular is the reader leans the direction of being spoon fed. How many times have we picked up books and never actually read em?

My anecdote, since I already had projects in mind and just wanted to synthesize how things were glued together A to Z: I went to SourceForge/GitHub/BitBucket and cloned repos for projects for the language of choice, build them, run the tests.

Also, https://github.com/search and lookup stuff of similar topic / using the same libraries (words like MIT, ISC, Apache 2, BSD are a good sign). Then check if it's permissively licensed. Also, in the end, you likely won't ever end up forking or copying. You're just getting the knowledge of how it's glued, and probably will wire stuff in uniquely for your case.

Building these projects in itself teaches the ropes of getting an environment setup (googling build errors, checking issue tracker), dependencies, test suites, and building a production-ready package.

I kept the best projects I found at https://github.com/tony/.dot-config/blob/master/.vcspull.yam.... Purely for studying the source of.

Python : Flask, Werkzeug, Django, SQLAlchemy

JS : Express, Backbone, blog posts by Addy Osmani and JS enterprise architecture and Derick Bailey on Marionette (but i don't think the backbone would be as relevant today, it def paved the way to modern frontend we see today)

C++ : OpenTTD

In the end, there weren't many books I found espoused building projects. I already had an idea of what to build - I just needed enough to "ramp up", but if you want books:

JavaScript Patterns: Build Better Applications with Coding and Design Patterns

Examples applied directly to the task at hand. All about scoping.

A python book, that hits different areas than this JS book would be The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python: https://docs.python-guide.org/

C++: Scott Meyer books are great

General programming: Code Complete