3 ms·

can someone weigh in on this vs thorsten ball's series of books? to my untrained eye they look fairly similar (at least thorsten's first book) but I'm not sure.

can someone weigh in on this vs thorsten ball's series of books? to my untrained eye they look fairly similar (at least thorsten's first book) but I'm not sure. edit: i should say i'm wondering which is more appropriate for me. my experience is that i took a PL class during my MS where we implemented a small recursive descent parser for a language (and the concomitant logic for evaluating the language). i'm interested in getting better at writing languages.

pansa2 7y ago
Crafting Interpreters is in two parts. AFAIK each part corresponds to one of Thorsten Ball’s two books.
runevault 7y ago
add on to what the other reply said, the second part is in pure c which means it likely gets far more gritty details as this book has to implement it's own hash map for storing the symbol table, since c doesn't have a huge standard library the way go does (note part 1 is in Java when he's building the AST runner instead of a bytecode compiler)
azhenley 7y ago
I think the books are complementary. There is definitely a different style in how they present info. I like both.
misternugget 7y ago
Hey! Thorsten Ball here. I'd say: yes, they're similar, but still two different perspectives on the same subject. (I actually recounted elsewhere [0] how Bob convinced me, 4 years ago now, that it's valuable to have multiple teachers of the same subject.) So if you're into the topic I think you can get something out of my books ([1], [2]) even if you've read Bob's book before. And if you read mine, then Bob's book will also show you something new. I'm currently working through Bob's book myself (chapter 23) and I'm enjoying it immensely: the language, Lox, shares a lot of things with the one in my books (Monkey), like first-class functions and closures, but also has classes which Monkey does not. So now I can read Bob's book and on one hand think "Ohh, I wonder how he does _that_" and on the other hand "classes! let's see how that works." My books also use Go exclusively and Bob's uses Java and C. I enjoyed using IntelliJ and writing Java for the first time in my life a lot and was always a fan of C, so that was also really interesting, to see how the ideas translate across three languages. [0]: https://lobste.rs/s/43h7rz/crafting_interpreters_handbook_for#c_di9tng https://lobste.rs/s/43h7rz/crafting_interpreters_handbook_fo... [1]: https://interpreterbook.com https://interpreterbook.com [2]: https://compilerbook.com https://compilerbook.com

pansa2 7y ago

Crafting Interpreters is in two parts. AFAIK each part corresponds to one of Thorsten Ball’s two books.

runevault 7y ago

add on to what the other reply said, the second part is in pure c which means it likely gets far more gritty details as this book has to implement it's own hash map for storing the symbol table, since c doesn't have a huge standard library the way go does (note part 1 is in Java when he's building the AST runner instead of a bytecode compiler)

azhenley 7y ago

I think the books are complementary. There is definitely a different style in how they present info. I like both.

misternugget 7y ago

Hey! Thorsten Ball here. I'd say: yes, they're similar, but still two different perspectives on the same subject. (I actually recounted elsewhere [0] how Bob convinced me, 4 years ago now, that it's valuable to have multiple teachers of the same subject.) So if you're into the topic I think you can get something out of my books ([1], [2]) even if you've read Bob's book before. And if you read mine, then Bob's book will also show you something new. I'm currently working through Bob's book myself (chapter 23) and I'm enjoying it immensely: the language, Lox, shares a lot of things with the one in my books (Monkey), like first-class functions and closures, but also has classes which Monkey does not. So now I can read Bob's book and on one hand think "Ohh, I wonder how he does _that_" and on the other hand "classes! let's see how that works." My books also use Go exclusively and Bob's uses Java and C. I enjoyed using IntelliJ and writing Java for the first time in my life a lot and was always a fan of C, so that was also really interesting, to see how the ideas translate across three languages. [0]: https://lobste.rs/s/43h7rz/crafting_interpreters_handbook_for#c_di9tng https://lobste.rs/s/43h7rz/crafting_interpreters_handbook_fo... [1]: https://interpreterbook.com https://interpreterbook.com [2]: https://compilerbook.com https://compilerbook.com