Build Your Own X From Scratch Books

Level up your coding skills. By building projects from scratch. With succinct & condensed books.

Redis Database Regex Engine Compiler Interpreter Web Server

The What & Why of “Build Your Own X From Scratch”

Pick a tool or software that you know, and try to recreate it by coding it from scratch. “From scratch” means not just glueing components together, but taking the time to understand how stuff works.

Why take on challenges like this? The benefits?

You are a student who has just learned programming, but has no real project experience. A build-your-own-X project will exercise what you learned in school. Without such practice, people will quickly forget what they learned and build suboptimal solutions in their future careers. It is also a nice thing to put on your resume.
You are a working software developer who seeks to level up your skills, but you are not sure what to focus on. A “From scratch” project will grant you the understanding of how things actually work. This kind of knowledge lasts much longer than “how to do X in framework/language Y”, which is becoming increasingly devalued as AI advances.
You are a hobbyist who likes to code. You probably also like learning how stuff works. Projects like this are very flexible, you can explore whatever topics interest you, or extend the project by adding bells and whistles.
With the advances in AI tools, producing code is not the problem; making the code work is! The people who excel at software development will be the people who excel at debugging, i.e. the people who understand how things work in detail. This may be your chance to survive and thrive in the AI revolution.

Build Your Own Redis with C/C++

Learn network programming and data structures by building a Redis-like server from scratch with C/C++.

Why build Redis? The knowledge required is broader and deeper than usual application-level development. It's a good way to level up your skills (mainly network programming and data structures).
Why start from scratch? A quote from Richard Feynman: “What I cannot create, I do not understand”. Human understanding is full of holes aka “things I don't know that I don't know”. Building from scratch is one way to ensure that your understanding is complete.
Why C? C is widely used in system programming and infrastructure software. Learn how C is used in real projects, with simple C code. No prior C/C++ experience is required.
Why a book? The Redis project is a complex software system built with a lot of effort, which can be hard to grasp for beginners. The book breaks down the core concepts into easily digestible steps.

Build Your Own Database From Scratch

Databases are not black boxes. Understand them by building your own from scratch!

From B-tree to KV store, then relational DB, in small steps and straightforward Golang code.

Content included:

Making data durable. Why databases instead of files? Working with fsync.
Coding a B+tree -- the data structure that enables efficient queries and incremental updates.
Achieving concurrent transactions via immutable (copy-on-write) data structures.
Relational DB on top of KV. How high-level features such as tables, primary keys, and secondary indexes are mapped to B+tree operations?
A small query language. How to parse the language and evaluate expressions (building an interpreter).

🆕 From Source Code To Machine Code

Ever wondered how computers turn source code into working software? You can learn the art by building your own mini-compiler.

A succinct book walks through a minimal yet complete compiler implementation. Compiles a static-typed language into x64 ELF executables.

Content included:

Simple interpreter. Get your own programming language up and running.
Bytecode compiler. The next step after the interpreter.
x64 assembly & instruction encoding. Understand how the machine works.
Translating bytecode into x64 code. Run your language natively on the machine.
Generating binary executables. The final step to a working compiler.

Build Your Own Web Server From Scratch In JavaScript

Understand the basis of the Web by coding a web server from scratch.

Learn network programming, HTTP protocol and their applications in one book.

Part I: Make A Basic HTTP Server

Introduction
HTTP Overview
Code A TCP Server
Promises and Events
Protocol Parser
HTTP Semantics & Message Format
Code Your First HTTP Server

Part II: Applications & Extensions

Serving Dynamic Contents
Static Files and Caching
Proxies and Load Balancers
Timeouts
WebSocket and Messaging