Programming work- and coloring book

Open-sourcing a passion project

I love teaching, and I love learning. Luckily every time I teach something, I learn something as well. A few years back, I decided to study some medicine on my own, just for fun. I discovered that for some subjects, there were work- and coloring books, with activities just like I used to do when I was a kid. I thought that was such a fantastic idea that I thought, why is there none for programming?

So I did what I often do and decided to start it myself, and as often happens, I discovered that creating such a book would require a lot of work, i.e., a lot of time. I am pretty busy writing my book, this blog, doing a weekly stream, keeping up with trends, and having a full-time job. So to take on more stuff, it needs to work towards my goals. While creating a workbook for programming is fun, and I think it can be helpful to some, I cannot justify dedicating the necessary time to it.

Crowdsourcing

That brings me to the point of the blogpost: An ask for help. I think there are many people out there who are at least as capable as me at writing such a book, and maybe they have more time than I do currently. So I am going to open-source what I have made so that anyone can contribute. This way, hopefully, the idea can get the life it deserves.

Structure of the repo

Whether you would like to contribute, or check it out because it is cute and fun, the repository is here: https://github.com/thedrlambda/workbook

The book is written in Latex and uses examples from Java because it is one of the most widely used languages. I have created a few exercises and some macros so it can be generated both with and without solutions.

I brainstormed five examples of areas to make exercises: Terminology, types, accessibility, UML, and loops. But these are by no means final, just suggestions for inspiration.

There are a handful of different types of exercises that I came up with to use as templates, but feel free to come up with others as long as they are fun and can be generated with and without solution.

And although I don’t have time to put into the workbook, I do put a lot of time into my refactoring book, so I would be thrilled if you would check it out: