How many books do you read per year?

As far as I can remember I haven't even finished 2 programming books this year. The first one was a 500-page book about web development written in very clear language yet it took me the entire summer break (about 3 months) to finish it. The book that I'm currently reading is only 400 pages and also one of the easier books, I started reading it in November and while December is nearly over I still haven't finished it. My goal was to finish it in one week, so about 50 pages per day which should be really doable since I'm NEETing anyway, but in the end I read less than 10 pages per day and at this pace I will never get good at SE. You might think that I'm putting too much emphasis on books (which is partly true) but it's the easiest way for me to measure my productivity. I tried pomodoro before but a lot of motivation is required to stick with scheduling in the first place so I usually end up getting distracted during the second or third session. Could lain recommend me anything to increase my passion for SE? Got recommended box breathing once for relaxation but it seems to be only effective for falling asleep quickly.

I read one book per day. Lain recommends SICP with Brian Harvey for wizardry. Maybe Gentoo docs for practical fun. SE in the modern use is a lot about stacking tools to build as impressive and tall skyscrapers as possible and showcasing them to the public. Math > SE

>>28895 >reading speed. When you are reading because you want to learn or understand something (as opposed to reading just for fun), you should read as slowly as you need to. There is nothing wrong if you read slowly and carefully. As Mortimer J. Adler put it in his book "How To Read A Book": There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly, and some should be read slowly and even laboriously. The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you—how many you can make your own. >pomodoro It's a good technique but you probably need to (and want to) adapt it to your own needs. I.e. don't follow it dogmatically but create a variation of it that suits your needs. It's generally recommended to keep your studying sessions short and at least less than a hour at a time. >Could lain recommend me anything to increase my passion for SE? The motivation has to be internal (and not external) if you want to enjoy what you are doing. Think about project you want to do or contribute to in the future. >breathing You could also try meditation or self-hypnosis (A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis by Melvin Powers https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/22814) For berating techniques, I was recommended https://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sob/index.htm

Reviewing my reading in the past five years, I've read over one hundred books and other documents; manually scanning over them to remove those which are very brief papers or otherwise quite short, I'm left with roughly a fifth of that number. This number means little, because a technical book of one thousand pages is being counted identically to a novel of a few hundred, and fiction is much easier to read; there are academic papers I've spent more time reading, and understanding, than books. Understanding is the goal, and some of the books I read require orders of magnitude more time to understand the contents of a page than others. My recommendation is to stop learning about web development, which is mostly worthless. >Could lain recommend me anything to increase my passion for SE? I read these books because I already have the passion. I decided to dedicate my life to the field of automatic computing. By now, I consider myself to be a hacker, and understand more than I knew was possible all of those years ago. Don't get into this for the money, because it will never amount to what true passion enables. To make a recommendation, read this document, that mentioned which took me a few weeks to go through, although I wasn't trying to make my way through it quickly, as written.

>>28900 Lainchan stripped it without telling me. That's not very nice.

>>28901 It won't attach, so here's a link: http://verisimilitudes.net/Can%20Programming%20Be%20Liberated%20from%20the%20von%20Neumann%20Style%3F

I don't know how many books I read per year since I mostly read textbooks(math, engineering, physics and cs ones) and technical books. Some of those books take a long time finish, others I finish in a month or so. I'm more interested in see what I have learned from the book than how fast I have read it.

>The motivation has to be internal Today I wanted to make a program that solved those slider puzzle things. I made a function that created one of those puzzles, then I wanted to do a visual representation with ASCII but figured that I wanna become a programmer and not a `sprintf` specialist. Might pick it up later again if I feel like it. >My recommendation is to stop learning about web development, which is mostly worthless. What? Without web development you wouldn't be able to post on this site. I know that web development is very controversial but I'm not one of those neckbeard hipsters at Starbucks that are still having an argument about whether Angular or React is better nor did I write a single line of JS. I sort of wanna learn TS because of static typing but it seems like all courses/books require you to know JS first. >Don't get into this for the money I don't care about money, it's been my passion for my entire life but for the past few years I've barely been able to get myself to do anything that used to be fun. >there are academic papers I've spent more time reading It's 30 pages but the pseudocode syntax is enough to scare me away. Is this a sign of lack of intelligence? >I was recommended Thanks, it looks convenient to read.

>>28895 I believe I happen to be in a similar position to you, although I'm also constantly aware that I used to be a lot better. There are plenty of things I want to learn and read about, but every time I set myself towards any of those matters I find myself ever underwhelmed as to how I'm progressing; matters that are supposed to take hours to solve now take days to even grasp, and concepts that should (and often were) clear and intuitive prove themselves ever more dense and obtuse. Interestingly enough, I've noticed that I used to be a lot more effective at moving towards my goals at times in which my practice was mostly constrained by external factors, and now that I have whole days to dedicate to the craft, my motivation to build and learn the things I so desire are somehow greatly diminished. I'm not yet sure of what to make this. >>28905 >What? Without web development you wouldn't be able to post on this site. I'd argue that a competent engineer, one that knows how computers and networks can work and be put together wouldn't have much trouble building a place like Lainchan, without the need to necessarily know "web development", because "web development" happens to be just a set of (arguably rather poor) implementations of a set of general principles/rules/systems for building networked computer systems in which he's already familiar with, and knows how to specialize accordingly. In that context, explicitly learning about "web development" is myopic and redundant, as it won't give you the proper foundations that would give you deep insight how systems like this can be conceived, as well as the ability to easily work and understand such systems, without also dragging along lots mostly-irrelevant specifics of a largely hype-driven accretion that would largely serve to cloud your vision on how things could be better designed in the long run. Once you understand the proper fundamentals, many of those matters become small or non-issues.

Probably about one, It's hard for me to find a book that interests me and keeps my attention long enough for me to finish it. I start probably around 5-10 books, but only ever finish one.

Which SE books are you planning on reading?

>passion for SE I recommend doing a small project you think is stupid and fun. Stupid praojects which you think may never help you or anyone else in the future, will, in fact, help you in the future.

I read on the way to work on the bus sometimes. it's not the best way, because it's usually recommended that you follow along. but I enjoy it. I think I've read 2-3 this year.

>>28905 >It's 30 pages but the pseudocode syntax is enough to scare me away. Is this a sign of lack of intelligence? Pseudocode is just generally awful to read. You get much higher conceptual clarity though the more mathematical languages such as denotational semantics, Lisp, the MLs, so on.

For some time my mind was a fuarrrking mess with all kinds of responsibilities and not fixing my soykaf etc. Im still that person, just a little less so because of Tony Buzan Study Skills book. Its on libgen. I study philosophy besides CS and the heavy reading took its toll on me. I always read for fun but when churning 250 pages of offtopic white noise that one is required to remember in a certain way, I found out I didnt really know how to study that soykaf. I still want to implement anki and my org mode setup has not really taken off yet (besides some literate programming for server/software configurations and the occasional latex paper). But i do have a solid grasp of how to read now, and i have to thank the Buzan book for that. >>28898 may be right when claiming >There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading But one definitely can infinitely improve comprehension and retention through a combination of activities while reading. I have experienced it, and like I said im not where I want to be yet, but it makes studying pretty fuarrrking easy when having a well defined method that you see works. Its essentially mindmapping plus speed reading and for me it works magic

I know the feeling. Been working and going to school but barely read 12 books this year. In fairness they were mostly thicker books but I have been reading a few extra smaller books and easier books. I have been reading on JQuery/JavaScript to get better at it but outside the JQuery not much more gain from it than I learned in school

I also feel like soykaf about my productivity, I have short periods during which I get more things done but I can never maintain that long term. I can't imagine being able to go through one textbook a month like some claim to, if I finish one every 2 or 3 months I'd already be bursting with joy.

fiction: 3-4, depends how many I get for christmas non-fiction: I think last year I read the majority of a textbook and a few monographs/lecture notes >50 pages per day no, I get through 3-4 on a good day when the material is challenging. You have to expect that.

maybe 10 books? problem with programming books is that 70% of the book may be rehash of stuff you already know, so you skip around to the 30% you dont know and take that. does that still count as reading the full book?

0; i never read a programming book.

im pretty much all over the place. it's not uncommon for me to start a book, read the first couple chapters and never finish it. these are all the books I've started reading this year >K&R - read first 5 chapters (not sure if i want to read the rest, kinda figured the rest out on my own) >ANSI C standard - read bits and pieces here and there >Practice of Programming - read first 2 chapters >Grokking Algorithms - Read first 6 chapters >SICP - read first 2/3 chapters (didn't like it) >Concrete Mathematics - reading the first chapter. doesnt seem too hard.

>>29744 ahh, fuarrrk i just realised two things >"this year" sounded like i started reading them all in 2022 when what i meant was the last 365~ days >I've literally never finished a single book

>>29903 Same. I never throught I'd like ereaders either, but when one was given to me anyway I was very pleasantly surprised. Not so good for some big page textbook formats but pretty good for a lot of types of things, and much easier on the eyes. I am able to get through a lot more pdfs and digital books with it than I ever was before. My only worry is that it discourages me from buying paper books because I can just get them online and actually read them easier. Before I'd actually need to get a paper copy if I was going to finish something 50+ pages long.

I wish I could read faster but something about how a book looks on an LCD just makes me slower I don't know why.

This is a bit unrelated to the original OP, but I have to say; I often beat myself up for my soykafty productivity in self-studying books and things I am interested in, but seeing I am not the only one here on this thread really makes me feel a bit more motivated. I am currently reading Head First Design Patterns. It's so fun to read, yet I am moving really slowly in it. I rarely finish a whole text book to the end.

I bought a fuarrrking printer and everytime I see a cool article, paper or even a book. I print it and put it on my desk - its gonna be physically there which makes me eager to read that soykaf. I've printed a article about eclipse even though im not interested into that to test my printer, but I really feel forced to read it. Leave alone, soykaf I find interesting to read. if I have the money I buy the book. After reading dozens of articles about how reading on devices declines your compreenhension, fuarrrks up your sleep, gives you anxiety, even changes your breathing patterns. The internet itself fuarrrks up with your brain. Read the "Shallow: what the internet is doing to our brains", or watch some video about it. It's fuarrrking scary. And ofc, its damn hard reading something on the internet, too many distractions. The only bad thing is that computing books are damn expensive, but I dont spend money much with anything else, and it takes time to you finish them before you go buying another one. You can always print it, anyways. So now I'm following what this guy is doing here: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec/consuming-articles-offline/ This recent article talks about how reading on screen affects compreension: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0.pdf So when I'm reading, I use pomodoro thru my watch, or else I keep getting distracted by my smartphone, or computer screen. I stay away from them when possible.

I'm illiterate. I've never needed to read before so I don't see why I'd start now.

>>29964 Lol I bet you won't be able to read this

In the same boat as >>29515 , but for the reasons of >>29445 . Though concepts and math can get interesting.

>>30038 Update: Started skimming through SICP for curiosity sake. It's written in such a way that it can keep my attention, which I didn't expect. Whenever I don't really have anything else to do, I may turn to that book now and skim a chapter, bookmark interesting stuff. So far I can't read a chapter in one go. Maybe that'll change.

>>30066 >So far I can't read a chapter in one go. SICP is quite dense, you aren't really expected to be able to read a chapter in one sitting anyway.

It looks like many lains here are struggling with their self-imposed expectations of reading productivity. I recently ran into this article that, while written for math books, maps over well enough to programming books and I think many here will benefit from reading: https://www.drmaciver.com/2016/05/how-to-read-a-mathematics-textbook/ To start with, it lays down some principles which I find liberating: >The goal is not, in fact, to read the textbook. The goal is to understand the material the textbook covers, and reading it helps you achieve that. >If you’re constantly making progress in the right direction, you will benefit even if you stop midway through the process. And further down it describes a goal-based strategy for book reading. Roughly, you pick something that you want to learn, then you attack the part of the book that covers that particular topic. Anything that comes up and which you need to understand first, you tackle then - anything else of interest, you leave for later. But do read the whole article for details! I've decided to take on the dragon book following this method, with the specific goal of understanding a particular type of parser that I think will fit one of my projects nicely.

>>30226 Thanks for this. I was actually on my way of developing the very same system (well, roughly), but I keep having such a hard time with the material that I end up overwhelmed and discouraged every time. Problem is, I keep insisting on reading linearly anyways. I'll try it this way see if itmworks for me. It's nice to see many of the same insights I developed mentioned by someone else. On a final note, I am reminded of those /sci/ reading lists which I am now convinced are made to absolutely misguide people, as they always give the same arvice: do ALL exercises. I agree with the article, all my mathematical knowledge (not that there's a lot of it) I have got it from reading bits of books and fitting those pieces together, rather than from reading any one single book, something I've never done.

Hi anons, I noticed that I haven't read any fiction book in approx' 3 years. I think that fiction books are easier to read, can be read faster than text books/non-fiction books, and they can improve text comprehension (with practice, you grok more words in less time). I do not have a culture of reading fiction books. Can you recommend me a good fiction book to read and pass time? I do not care (much) about genre. A note on language: I prefer to read non-fictional books in English, because it's the standard language for computer science. But fiction books are written in a language which is much different from the one of text-books. Their language uses a much more vulgar (in the sense of common (as in vulgar Latin), not in the sense of obscene) or dialectal vocabulary that often cannot be grasped by people who have English as second language (which is my case). So, in the case of fiction books, I prefer to read either flawlessly translated books (e.g., LotR was impeccably translated to my language (as opposed to Swedish)), or books written originally in my native language. Good translated books are rare, though. So, if you know any good fiction book originally written in my native language (Portuguese), or acceptably translated into it, please recommend me.

>>30228 José Saramago is a good author. I've read some of his books in English, but they were translated from Portuguese. "Ensaio sobre a cegueira" or "Todos os Nomes" are good places to start.

>>30228 Hard to recommend something without any criterions. Here are some classics (mainly SF and fantasy) that are probably well translated: * Anything by Jules Verne: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, From the Earth to the Moon, The Mysterious Island (my favourite), etc... * Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. * Edgar Allan Poe's short stories; I wanted to add Lovecraft, but it must be read in English, to be honest. * Everything by H. G. Wells. * Frank Herbert's Dune and The Dosadi Experiment. * Bram Stoker's Dracula. * Glen Cook's The Black Company (not so much a classic as one of my favourite works) and the slightly pulpey Garrett P.I.. * Classic pulp fiction like Howard (Conan the Barbarian) or Burroughs (Tarzan, A Princess of Mars). * Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. * Roger Zelazny is a bit less known but still classic enough for me: first part of The Chronicle of Amber or This Immortal....

>>30228 Don't be a pussy, learn to read fiction in english as well, after all, your goal is to increase comprehension, isn't it? Tolkien, for instance, has a really gorgeous prose, and you surely miss on it for fear of not being able to read it. To be sure, you will need a dictionary for some words, tolkien especially uses many archaic words. I suggest giving The Hobbit a try, the prose is light and easy to read. And just so you know, I'm not a native english speaker either. >Their language uses a much more vulgar (in the sense of common (as in vulgar Latin), not in the sense of obscene) The word you're looking for is 'vernacular', or colloquial, though the first is more accurate.

I think if you have to count how many books you've read you're doing it for the wrong reasons. If you're reading to try and become an intellectual, don't. As someone who reads constantly, I can say from experience that the average book is just as mind-numbing as the average movie or TV show. Hell, they might even be worse, since it's a less popular medium with less competition. The only reason it looks better is because it's older and thus has had more time to accumulate classics.

>>28900 how old are you? how old were you when you started? I yearn for a passion as strong as yours...

>>30392 I was around 7 or 8. My parrents (who are also avid readers) were clever. They encoraged me to read during otherwise "boring" parts of the day like while riding the bus, going to the bathroom, and before bed. It was a great way to make an otherwise dry (compared to games and movies) medium fun.

>>30495 and programming?

>>30547 Around 13. I wanted to make my own games, so I jumped into the deep end and bought a C++ book. I didn't actually get very far with it; the book was written with the assumption that you already understood basic concepts like variables, functions, types, scope, etc, and C++ itself was way too complex for young me anyway. But it served as a jumping off point for programming as a whole, since after that I sought out books that would teach me the basics in simpler languages

i haven't read a book, front to end, in years does anyone have any advice? i keep losing motivation after the first few days of reading even if it's stuff i find interesting

>>30714 >does anyone have any advice? If you already know the stuff the section is talking about, you *can* skip it if you want to. And make a promise to yourself that you read for 30 minutes everyday.

I got a book on C++ for beginners about a month ago and a book on computer fundamentals today. They seem to go well together. The c++ book didn't explain bitwise operators very well, as it assumed you had some knowledge on binary already. i checked

>>31000 Wait, is that the same Herbert Schildt who wrote "C - The Complete Reference" etc. ? >http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/bullschildt.html >https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/schildt.html ... Perhaps you should read Bjarne Stroustrup's Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, 2nd ed. instead?

>>31000 Herbert Schildt is like kicking dead whales down the beach. Stay away from it.

>>31001 >>31002 The book has decent reviews on Amazon and teaches C++98 lol. I'm definitely gonna buy a book by Bjarne Stroustrup covering C++11, so I'm not gonna treat it as the Bible.

>>31003 If you will read the book, I recommend you skip PPP2 and buy either the newest edition of The C++ Programming Language or the newest edition of C++ Primer by Stanley B. Lippman; Josée Lajoie; Barbara E. Moo.

>>31004 Ok, I ordered TC++PL (4th ed) and it got delayed to arrive between 21/june - 25/june. It's a big book but I'm on break in about a week

>>28895 Buy a book with exercises is all I can recommend. Concepts are useless and rapidly forgotten unless applied. >>28897 >SICP SICP is cool, and there's a free JS version online if you want to work through the fundamentals without learning Scheme. (Not to say you shouldn't learn Scheme, but the physical SICP book is expensive and JS is everywhere.)

>>31557 But the whole SICP is available on the web: > SICP https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html > SICP lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CABEA24090&index=1 > more exercises: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/61a-pages/Volume1/CS%2061A%20Course%20Reader,%20Volume%201.html > MIT/GNU Scheme for SICP: https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/ (use this for SICP)

>>31533 it arrived i'm gonna be reading it throughout school break

I'm going through Accelerated C++ currently, trying to nail down one hour of studying per day. It's working out well so far, good rythmn. Once I'm don with it I plan to start with the first volume of Art of Computer Programming. It's going to rip me a new one but I'll grind through even if it takes a year.

>>31621 R.I.P. your brain cells

>>31629 that'd be the case if i went for "Programming Rust" instead haha

>>31623 >Accelerated C++ just be aware you'll want to move onto a book like effective modern c++ or just google modern c++ tutorials to unlearn a few outdated/bad things. primarily three things: use auto keyword instead of manually typing out iterators (unless you are a masochist). just don't use it for declaring all other non-iterator variables, it will reduce code readability for zero benefit https://www.bogotobogo.com/cplusplus/C11/C11_Type_Inference_auto_range_based_for_loop.php https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3434256/use-the-auto-keyword-in-c-stl https://andrewshitov.com/2019/11/09/iterators-vs-auto-in-cpp/ use smart pointers instead of new/delete keywords for heap memory allocated data (otherwise any program you write of significant size will inevitably become a memory-leaking pile of sh𝔦t compared to anything written in rust or a language with GC) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37514509/advantages-of-using-stdmake-unique-over-new-operator https://www.modernescpp.com/index.php/memory-and-performance-overhead-of-smart-pointer (tl;dr: use std::make_unique) use ranged based for loops instead of traditional for loops when iterating through STL data structures (unless you want to get out-of-bounds errors from careless counting mistakes) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15927033/what-is-the-correct-way-of-using-c11s-range-based-for

>>31631 Say what you will about Rust and its community, at least it's an actual language. C++ is to C as Systemd is to Linux.

>>31637 Is there even a C++ books that is almost up to date? Something that doesn't make me have to unlearn some outdated concepts.

>>31641 don't worry about it. it doesn't take long to learn the newer C++11 (e.g. auto keyword, range-based for loops, smart pointers like std::unique_ptr) and C++14 (e.g. std::make_unique) stuff, primarily those few things i mentioned which are the most important. accelerated c++ is a fine beginner's book. the code examples are admittedly boring and unrealistic (nobody would write a student grading program in c++ these days as opposed to in a higher-level language for many reasons, e.g. c++'s string manipulation manages to be both limited and overcomplicated), but at least the author managed to write a decent way to teach the reader c++ programming "by example" instead of being just a 1000+ page reference like >>31621 . with regards to some outdated stuff, for example in chapter 5.2, neither of these two fragments are "modern c++" for (vector<Student_info>::size_type i = 0; i != students.size(); ++i) cout << students[i].name << endl; for (vector<Student_info>::const_iterator iter = students.begin(); iter != students.end(); ++iter) { cout << (*iter).name << endl; } this on the other hand uses a range-based for loop and auto keyword to let the compiler figure out the iterator type. see how much simpler and cleaner it looks? for (const auto& student : students) std::cout << student.name << std::endl; (take note that i typed std::cout instead of cout. "using namespace std;" is considered bad practice because it "pollutes your namespace." if you don't wish to type std::cout all the time, "using std::cout;" is much better because it narrows down to only include that specific object and not the entire std namespace. read more about that here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1452721/why-is-using-namespace-std-considered-bad-practice ) of course, assuming you care about performance, C's I/O library (stdio.h) is much preferred over C++ bloated and slower I/O library (iostream), so you'd use printf instead of std::cout and the newline character "\n" instead of std::endl for (const auto& student : students) printf("%s\n", student.name.c_str()); this is why i always tell people who want to learn C++ that they should learn C first, even though this advice makes a lot of people on the internet extremely butthurt (on both sides, whether they're C or C++ fanboys). spoiler: both languages have their pros and cons and there are times when mixing in tried-and-true idomatic C code with your C++ code is perfectly fine. but let's not spark that nerd flame war here. i guess the other thing is don't get too caught up in "inheritance" and "polymorphism" in chapter 13. learn it, but don't blindly assume your code you write is somehow better if you design it with inheritance/polymorphism. i think most people by now have realized inheritance is generally bad and unnecessary now with 2 decades of experiencing "inheritance hell" since that book was published. now the consensus appears to be "prefer composition over inheritance." i'd go a step further and say OOP as a whole isn't necessary but now we'd be getting into flame war territory.

>>31638 What?? C++ is also an actual language. It just has its origins rooted in C.

what arm64 book should i buy if all i know is c++?

>>28895 3-4 programming books. 5-10 normal fiction/non-fiction. I wish I read more but I have some troubles staying focused :L

>>31658 Frankly, i think most of the stuff you can do with C++ could easily be done with plain C, and some libraries. Even so, there are a lot of things in C++ that are a terrible idea, like templates. So you could probably replace them with something else if you have to.

>>33411 Templates are good if you write C flavored C++, you can basically write C with generics.

>>31621 So what's the outcome Anon? It's mostly a reference work, but there are plenty of code examples included.

I've pretty much just started. In September, I was gifted a large book on martial arts, which I read through, and it was a very good book. I decided to use the 'momentum' and I've launched into reading. It was on and off, but about now I'm picking up pace. I've gone through three books now, none of them are textbooks though. But I will start as I have accumulated some textbooks. Pro tip, opportunity/charity shops can be book goldmines. Especially if you go to them at the right time, when people finish school and can't be fuarrrked to sell their "outdated" textbooks, you can pick them up for a few dollars. It's very scroungy, so never any guarantees, but it will get you cheap reading material, and if you do it for a while you'll come across some good stuff.

>>30226 pretty neat, thanks lainon!

>>30226 I am interested in understanding parsers too. I want to move beyond just knowing some regex. Considering the dragon book vs something like crafting interpreters, what do you think ?

>>34854 Parsing is far less complex than people make it out to be. It's just iterating over the chars in a string to produce tokens, then iterating over those tokens to produce a syntax tree of declarations and statements. crafting interpreters would be the better book.

>>34856 What's the last step? How do you interpret the tree into code ?

>>34870 You translate those instructions to assembly, machine code, C or something runnable, then run it.

>>34870 After collecting all declarations into lists via parsing (lists of structs functions variables etc) the program tree is evaluated by name binding, and if statically typed type checking. Every name/identifier within an expression or type is replaced with a reference to the declaration itself (by iterating through declaration lists to find a matching name). Types are asserted to match or be compatible for every operation, assignment, function, argument, etc. When interpreting its easier to write a tree walk interpreter than compile it to a bytecode (which is a bit similar to compiling to real cpu machine code). All that's necessary is holding all the memory of the currently executing program and to be able to modify that memory in different ways depending on the currently interpreted statements. The memory includes an "instruction pointer" which stores a reference to the current statement & expression element, a function call stack which stores where to set the "instruction pointer" to when a return statement happens, and memory for variables declared by the program.

>>34882 Getting a lot out of your reply, can you elaborate a bit more. The only thing I understood until now we're regular languages and production rules. Anything for me to read ?

>>35105 What in particular do you want elaboration upon? I don't have a book to recommend, they tend to over complicate things and not get to the point.

>>35108 When you say The memory includes an "instruction pointer" which stores a reference to the current statement & expression element, a function call stack which stores where to set the "instruction pointer" to when a return statement happens, and memory for variables declared by the program. This looks very similar to how machine is right? I am having a hard time separating the language mechanics from the machine it runs on.

started introduction to algorithms just today, new into programming and soykaf fuarrrking amazing, i'm already loving it

>>35111 Ah sorry, I put "instruction pointer" in quotes to mean pseudo instruction pointer, I can see how that was confusing. The pointer itself is just a regular pointer to the current interpreter instruction. And an interpreter instruction is just a Struct containing a description of an action for the interpreter to perform. Creating an interpreter is kind of like making a virtual cpu or an emulator. The interpreter can be mechanically very different than an actual physical cpu yet broadly it does resemble one. An interpreter is fed a block of instructions and takes different actions depending on what those instructions are. It evaluates one instruction then it goes to the next instruction. Unless if it was told to jump to a specific instruction, like in a while loop or an if statement when a condition is met. Likewise an actual CPU does all these things too.

Does anyone have any recommended books on diff algorithms? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around them. Also books on register allocation and other practical algorithms would be nice.

not enough in general tech or otherwise.