Hello! I’m looking for book recommendations for learning programming fundamentals.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily looking for a book on learning language(s), but rather, programming, theory I guess you might call it?
For example, I’ve been playing around a lot in my terminal writing bash scripts, and I just implemented my first function. Another example, I know the phrase “Object Oriented programming”, but have no idea what it means.
I learn well by doing, and I’ve learned a lot just writing scripts and reading about bash scripting, but I also realize there’s a lot about programming at a higher level that I know nothing about.
Head First Design Patterns really helped me untangle the spaget
95% of all “Introduction to <whatever programming language>” books tend to dedicate the first couple of chapters to the fundamentals but with a specific bias towards the language in question. Seek out a few of those at a library or online equivalent and you’ll start to see patterns cropping up.
Anything that doesn’t have that bias is likely to use pseudocode which looks like a programming language anyway.
Object orientation works around the concept that things in the program “know” things about themselves and how to do things for themselves rather than have some other part of the program do things to them. Commonly you’ll see things like
doSomethingWith(someObject)being the non-OO way andsomeObject.doSomethingbeing the OO way. That is, in the lattersomeObjectcontains the knowledge of how todoSomething, and the dot notation urges it to do whatever it is.For a silly but more concrete example,
x ← 2 + 2is non-OO, butx ← 2.add(2)is at least partially OO because the first 2 is expected to know how to add another 2 to itself and give out the correct answer. Presumably in whatever language that is, someone has created a method for numbers to know what to do when told toadd. The other 2 doesn’t really get a say in things. We might also have, say,elephant.putOn(hat), but it might not be possible tohat.putOn(elephant)because no-one thought to teach the hat how to wear things, let alone elephants.Its a long path but one you can take at your own pace. Good luck
If you are looking at learning CS in a more holistic manner, there’s Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science!. It’s a list of courses, categorized by topics, which are exactly what a CS undergraduate would learn. It might feel daunting at first, but you can pick any interesting topic and dive in.
I especially recommend CS50P for beginners.
OOP was a 1990s thing that is still around but don’t worry about it too much at first.
The classic intro book is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs aka SICP. You can find it online with a web search. It will give you a good grounding in fundamentals. Then you can figure out what to pursue next.
Found it. Thank you!
Some people who are self studying Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs have been using a discord server to assist each other as needed. I realize that there are a number of people using Lemmy whi are very opposed to using discord over other options, but I don’t know of any other sustained forums focused on this book.
I think “Code” might fit the bill.
The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth
That’s an entry point into programming that’s not for everyone. It seems like the poster is looking for something more hands on and pragmatic rather than technical and academic.
‘Programming from the ground up’ the main idea of this one is to teach programming in a bottom up way, so very low level.
it’s mostly about teaching (linux) assembly to beginners, so in a way it is just learning a new language. But it’s mainly about understanding low level how a computer works, like registers, kernel calls, how function calls are handled, all for beginners. It’s really easy to pick up.
Knowing those fundamentals can go a long way in understanding other computing concepts.
Others that come to mind are :
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
- A Philosophy of Software Design
- Software Architecture: The Hard Parts"
I highly recommend the online book How to Think Like a Computer Scientist.
Fun fact, the person maintaining this book is professor emeritus from my college and received multiple awards of recognition from the IEEE
An author of the original book, Allen B. Downey, has released a third edition if his updates that is also available online at no cost and in Allen B. Downey’s words:
The book is now entirely in Jupyter notebooks, so you can read the text, run the code, and work on the exercises – all in one place. Using the links below, you can run the notebooks on Colab, so you don’t have to install anything to get started.
The text is substantially revised and a few chapters have been reordered. There are more exercises now, and I think a lot of them are better.
It’s interesting to see how the same source material has grown into two differently maintained and similar resources.
The Pragmatic Programmer https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-20th-anniversary-edition/
It sounds like you may be ready to Obey The Testing Goat
On mobile atm but there’s the Princeton books on Computer Science
