nowfound

Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I Wrote a 680-Page Interactive Book on Data Structures and Algorithms

Hello HN! I’m Elias. I’ve been an educator in Engineering and Computer Science for some years, and I'm always looking for ways to make learning more engaging and hands-on. A few months ago, I started experimenting with the idea of a book that changes and evolves as you interact with it. It started with a chapter on sorting but that snowballed into a 22-chapter interactive book. My objective in writing this book, was to introduce a more interactive format for technical books that doesn't require internet access, that is lightweight, comprehensive, cross-platform, and can provide a better…

Elias created a 680-page interactive book covering data structures and algorithms across 22 chapters. The book features over 300 interactive visualizations and editable code snippets that work offline and run on any… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1AC

    I'm making a coloring book of data structures and algorithms for programmers and students. So far I have a prototype page for a sorting algorithm (albeit a rather simple one). Here the Selection Sort coloring pages you can print. https://coderscoloringbook.com/selectionsort And here is how I colored mine. https://coderscoloringbook.com/selectionsortcolored A coloring book is not quite enough to teach algorithms on its own, but I really get a lot from visual reinforcement of what I learn from books/lectures. Do you think having coloring pages like this could…

    2017 · its alternatives →

  2. 2IW

    https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming-in-j... This book is a distillation of everything I’ve learned about what effective development looks like in Java (so far!). It's about how to organize programs around data "as plain data" and the surprisingly benefits that emerge when we do. Programs that are built around the data they manage tend to be simpler, smaller, and significantly easier understand. Java has changed radically over the last several years. It has picked up all kinds of new language features which support data oriented programming (records,…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I started writing this book 10 years ago in JavaScript, got through a few chapters (asymptotic notation, basic techniques, start of sorting), and then abandoned it. Recently I picked it back up, converted everything to TypeScript, and used AI (Zenflow [1] + Claude Opus 4.6) to complete the remaining chapters. I provided the structure, direction, and initial chapters; the AI generated the bulk of the remaining content under a spec-driven workflow. The book covers roughly a first 1-2 year CS curriculum: sorting, dynamic programming, graph algorithms, trees, heaps, hash tables, and more. All…

    Mar 2026 · amoilanen.github.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi HN! I'm currently a Master's student at USTC (University of Science and Technology of China). I've been diving deep into Data Engineering, especially in the context of Large Language Models (LLMs). The Problem: I found that learning resources for modern data engineering are often fragmented and scattered across hundreds of medium articles or disjointed tutorials. It's hard to piece everything together into a coherent system. The Solution: I decided to open-source my learning notes and build them into a structured book. My goal is to help developers fast-track their learning curve. Key…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5MO
  6. 6IW

    Hey HN! I've been working on a book about WebAssembly over the last few months, and it's finally available at http://levelupwasm.com! Why a book on WebAssembly you ask? Well... WebAssembly is awesome (obviously ) but it's certainly not the easiest thing to learn. So I wrote this book as a practical intro to using WebAssembly in your web apps. I would appreciate any feedback!

    2019 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    The guide for building large, iOS, and Android native apps - with the challenges and common solutions across the industry.

    2021 · mobileatscale.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…

    2024 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Learn about designing and analyzing algorithms

    2016 · amazon.in · its alternatives →

  10. 10MI

    An interactive book introducing programming with ClojureScript

    2017 · langintro.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Visual explanations of Algorithms and Data structures

    2020 · chrislaux.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hey HN! I wrote a book on programming called The Elements of Code. I put the entire book online here: https://elementsofcode.io/ When mentoring (usually new) programmers, I noticed there were a few common mistakes that seemed to account for about 80% of the complexity in their code. I couldn’t find a concise guide to fixing those mistakes, so I decided to write one. The title is an homage to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which is the classic guide for communicating well using prose. That guide is quite tactical in nature, and I wanted to parallel its focus in The…

    2021 · pragprog.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13IW

    The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…

    Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    "The Bible" of all fundamental algorithms for programming

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…

    2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Clever solutions to classic programming problems

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17SP

    Hi HN, Over the past 6 months I've been working on a technical book focused on helping aspiring data scientists to get hands-on experience with cloud computing environments using the Python ecosystem. The book is targeted at readers already familiar with libraries such as Pandas and scikit-learn that are looking to build out a portfolio of applied projects. To author the book, I used the Leanpub platform to provide drafts of the text as I completed each chapter. To typeset the book, I used the R bookdown package by Yihui Xie to translate my markdown into a PDF format. I also used Google docs…

    2020 · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Broad span of algorithms, covered in clear depth

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hello HN, It has been a while since I contributed to the web, so I decided to get back in shape and publish "something". This app is a POC of "what if diagrams were more dynamic". I'm a software engineer by trade, and with conventional tools, I often times struggle to explain flows of data in complex software systems. I got inspired by video games like The Incredible Machine and Factorio, as in some ways, software systems tend to become Rube Goldberg-esque machines ;) As a side quest, I also wanted to craft diagrams faster than text-based tools (ex: mermaid), as I am always forgetting their…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20MB
  21. 21
    Kooba▲141

    An interactive graph for finding new books

    2017 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Interactive book on concurrent programming with auto-tested exercises.

    2024 · antonz.org · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Solid advice and awesome analogies

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Handbook on agile software craftsmanship

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →