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books·BooksbyFredselfish

Any good books on coding?

Not just coding, but writing whole new type of code? History on coding be nice as well. I already own Hackers:Heroes of the Computer Revolution. But like other books on it as well.

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DagwoodIII
piefed.social

[off topic]

The Difference Engine by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson.

Alternate history where Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage gave the British Empire a working, steam driven computer.

Fun book.

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nandeEbisureply
lemmy.world

Researching and playing around.

Where are you starting? This topic is extremely deep, but I think to start you should understand how most parsers work, poke around wikipedia to understand lexical analysis, context-free grammars and check the links. Play around with python libraries like Lark https://lark-parser.readthedocs.io/en/stable/how_to_use.html#getting-started

They have some examples of writing custom parsers https://github.com/lark-parser/lark/tree/master/examples

Or pick your starting point for wikipedia rabbit holes. I'm not a hugely opinionated language person, I have the features I'm used to using and semantics I prefer but don't really get opinionated about the actual syntax of most languages.

There's LALR parsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LALR_parser

Parse trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_tree

Reverse Polish Notation and Shunting-Yard for the old school stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

I guess my generation (mid-30s) people who grew up interesting in computers often went through a whole language phase. I picked it up professionally and was more interested in it as a tool, rather than a purely academic pursuit, but understanding fundamentals helps you a lot when it comes to executing on whatever project interests you.

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AnarchistArtificerreply
slrpnk.net

Seconding this recommendation. If OP is after novelty, this book might seem, at first glance, to not fit the bill. However, there's a reason why it's become a cult classic. I really like how, although it uses LISP for its examples, it's actually a really cool look at the more abstract side of computing. As I understand it, for its time, it was weird as shit

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shittydwarfreply
sh.itjust.works

I think if I had to describe it succinctly, I would have to say it's mind altering? They teach a concept you can understand, again and again and then suddenly they reveal the 'trick' that they have been building up to then and you're Paul Atreides on Arrakis tripping balls on spice as your awareness suddenly expands

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SpaceNoodlereply
lemmy.world

This is how I learned LISP! I still have my copy, which I bought new when it came out ...

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Fredselfishreply
lemmy.world

Would be better to learn it through a book, or any good places to learn for free?

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AnarchistArtificerreply
slrpnk.net

I've found that learning programming from books to be more reliable, especially with how much slop there is on the modern web. I find that books (which don't necessarily need to come in the form of a physical book — there are some great ones that are fully online). A crucial aspect though, regardless of what resource you use, is that you need to do the exercises as you go. This is something that I wish that I had understood earlier; I wasted a lot of time trying to treat this learning as something that you can do purely from reading, whether that be books or resources on the web.

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perishthethought
piefed.social

JavaScript the Good Parts
By Douglas Crockford

Some will say its outdated, but I still dig it.

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