A New Route to Programming
$9.90
Minimum price
$14.90
Suggested price

A New Route to Programming

Learn Programming Through Preserving Digital Heritage

About the Book

I like that it is simple enough for anyone to understand :) maybe I will start programming

— an early reader

Learn programming a different way. Learn programming by working through examples of how to preserve your cultural heritage. This book aims to be an on-ramp to all of the excellent technical material that's out there. It will give you the confidence to explore more deeply how programming works and how it can help.

Here are some of the things that we’ll get up to:

  • Learn how computers interpret numbers, text, images and other data
  • Create a comprehensive backup of a website
  • Process a miniature web harvest, using the standards that the Internet Archive uses
  • Extract places and dates from websites
  • Turn Captain James Cook’s journal into an interactive website
  • Provide pointers to further topics such as mobile app development, and data visualisation

About the Author

Tim McNamara
Tim McNamara

Tim is the author of Rust in Action and has extensive experience in using and teaching the language. He has been invited to deliver courses, workshops, and talks across Europe, Oceania, and North America. His background is in AI/ML, specifically natural language processing.

Table of Contents

  • A Motivating Introduction
    • What you will learn
  • Some guiding principles
    • Programming is cultural
    • Programmers use analogies
    • Programmers like to simplify
    • Programming works by building up components
    • Programming works by breaking down problems
    • Programming works by making trade offs
    • Naming things is hard
  • First steps programming
    • Step 1: Open a web browser
    • Step 2: Open its web developer console
    • Step 3: Begin to code
  • How computers interpret information
    • Numbers
    • Text
    • Pictures
    • Dates
    • Lists
    • Truth values
    • Uncertainty
    • Nothingness
  • Create a comprehensive website backup
    • An Overview of the Approach
    • Tools
    • Defining a web page
    • A note about embedded videos
    • Respecting robots.txt
    • How we select specific elements
    • Downloading web sites
    • Compress the downloads

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

80% Royalties. Earn $16 on a $20 book.

We pay 80% royalties. That's not a typo: you earn $16 on a $20 sale. If we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book or course for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub