fuzzy post-it

the more i think about this

the more i want to write a book based on building an interactive fiction engine

touches a lot of bases, can be built up incrementally, oughta be interesting to a wide variety of people, and produces something novel you can actually show off to others

lol i want to explain my ideas for what i want to write in a programming “book” but i barely know how to do it without actually writing thousands of words as examples

but basically uh

i want to target people who are already familiar with computers and comfortable with like keyboard shortcuts and typing arcane things, but have just never quite gotten into programming

and i want to keep going beyond just baby intro to python, and keep writing about how to use databases and how to make web applications or command-line applications

and i want to interleave chapters, so you get to pick up intermediate python things while you’re picking up super baby html/css

and i want to touch on more abstract things like designing architecture and testing and using source control and sharing your code

and i want the whole way along for the reader to actually be building Real Things instead of just toy examples

like probably each large chunk (book?) would start with a goal program we want to write, that sounds conceptually simple but is wildly beyond what we know right now, and then figure out how to go build it. because that’s basically how i get better at anything

and most likely this will all just end up online as like blocks of articles clustered together

anyway idk does any of that sound helpful or interesting

eta: also i am real big on explaining why and how things work, instead of shoving things at you to memorize. i’m pretty sure like 60% of this will be themed asides

i’m strongly considering making an attempt to write two books (conveniently designed so i can do any part of any of them in any order):

• a beginner’s guide to programming that starts from absolutely nothing and alternates frequently between theory/practice, multiple languages, multiple platforms, etc. so you would have to context switch a bit early on, but ultimately you would be able to make actual things instead of just text-only programs that convert from feet to meters. (this will probably span endless volumes and be an eternal work in progress)
• a math book collab with lati in which each chapter tries to explain, in an actually accessible way, some topic that we feel western education treats extremely poorly. probably limited to calc 2 + linalg and below. ex: logarithms, trig functions, complex numbers

would you be interested in reading these

would you be interested in beta-reading these as i write them (because i have a hard time sticking with a project that i can’t use myself in a vacuum)

and most importantly, would you be interested in giving me dollars for a hard copy of these