4 ms·
I still maintain that "The AWK Programming Language" [1] is one of, if not the best programming language book I've read so far. It's short and to the point, ha
by btschaegg 3y ago
I still maintain that "The AWK Programming Language" [1] is one of, if not the best programming language book I've read so far.
It's short and to the point, has good examples, and cuts most of the usual fluff like "what is a variable?". Its base assumptions are: You know how to program, and you're here to learn AWK. Let's get to it.
I dearly wish there'd be more books like it for other languages.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7 https://archive.org/details/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7
- mbivert 3y agoI don't remember reading it but from the ToC & glimpsing at some examples/exercises, it definitely fits in the "Tutorials" category I was thinking of. It's always delightful to see competent authors demonstrate how much sophistication is achievable in about 100 lines of simple code, by comparison with the "the Dog class inherits from the Animal class" type of examples, or "real-life" codebases. This book is definitely in the former category. > I dearly wish there'd be more books like it for other languages. This all reminds me of a well-known regular expression matcher[0], in about 30 lines of C, featured in "The Practice of Programming"[1]. More generally, even without dedicated books, there are common simple-but-sophisticated type of programs that are great to get to know a language, once you have basic programming skills: standard UNIX tools (cat(1), grep(1), etc.), λ-calculus interpreter, LISP interpreter, raytracer, etc. One can often find online versions serving as "solutions." [0]: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/beautiful.html https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/be... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming