::Links/Programming

Useful resources for learning programming

Books

• The Art of Computer Programming

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (free)

• How to design Programs (free)

• Crafting Interpreters (free)

• "Dragon Book"

• Rheinwerk-Verlag (german)

• O'Reilly "Animal Books"

Good starter languages

• Golang

  • Getting Started

  • Editor support

  • echo: very nice web framework

  • data storage with SQLite

• Kotlin (JVM-based)

  • Getting Started

  • IDE (Community Edition is more than enough, you don't need Ultimate)

• Haskell (for learning Pure Functional programming)

• p5.js (for quickly making graphical stuff)

Other language stuff

• Esolangs

• Rosetta Code

• Concatenative Languages

Simple beginner challenges

• Program that just prints "Hello, World!" to the terminal

• Ask the user for their name, then print Hello, <name>!

  • Ask for birthday too, print Happy Birthday! if today is their birthday

• Number guessing game:

  • Program picks a random, secret number between 1 and 100

  • User enters a guess, program replies with Too small!, Too big! or Correct!

  • Loop until user guessed correctly

• RPN Calculator

  • read lines of text from user, evaluate each one separately

  • start with basic operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide)

  • e.g. entering 1 2 3 + + 7 * should output 42

  • decide how to handle more than one element on the stack when outputting (e.g. fail, output only top element with warning, output entire stack)

  • add constants (π (Pi), τ (Tau, Pi · 2, the cooler Pi), e (Euler/Napier constant), …)

  • add support for more complex functions (e.g. roots, powers, logarithms, trigonometry, …)

  • add support for reading & evaluating an entire file (i.e. all at once, not line-by-line)

• ToDo list application:

  • accept commands:

    • add <arbitrary text>

    • complete <index>

  • after each command, display a list of items with their indices

  • add save & load functionality: when given a filename, the program should try to load the todo list from that file & save it on exit (e.g. add a command exit or react to Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D)

  • also save date & time for each added item (if you haven't already, maybe switch to JSON or YAML for your savefile format?)

  • add sort <what> command, what can be text or time, sort todo list by that, ensure that it's persistent (when you save & load, the order should be the same since the last sort)

Advanced challenges

• LeetCode

• HackerRank

• PocketEuler

• Advent of Code

• Pro/g/ramming Challenges

Things to avoid:

• Learning a specific language instead of general techniques

• Trying to build too big too early / skipping over small exercises

• Python (for general purpose programming; it's still a nice scripting language)

• Rust:

  • extremely over-designed

  • oriented more towards intellectualism than actual problem solving

  • highly fragmented package ecosystem; dozens of packages for the same thing