640 Pages in 15 Months

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2021-07-29 15:00:06

My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago. But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, ebook and PDF versions are done. You can buy it. You can hold it in your hands. And I do mean “hands” plural. Because this little “handbook” turned out way larger than I anticipated:

Look at that thing. 640 pages, eight inches wide, ten inches tall. If you get tired of reading it, it can serve as a doorstop or protect you from small-arms fire.

Remember back on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood when he would take you to a factory and show you how pencils or umbrellas are made? I love that stuff, so I thought maybe you might like to see what I spent the past year on. You can read this as a peek behind the curtain, or maybe a long apology for why it took so long.

What I said in my last post was that Crafting Interpreters was finished, and by that I meant that I’d written all the code, dotted the last sentence, and scanned the last illustration. The content of the book was complete. But it wasn’t a book yet. Just a pile of Markdown and PNG files that my embarrassingly bad Python code would begrudgingly turn into a website.

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