I believe one reason buying books is so popular is the reader leans the direction of being spoon fed. How many times have we picked up books and never actually read em?<p>My anecdote, since I already had projects in mind and just wanted to synthesize how things were glued together A to Z: I went to SourceForge/GitHub/BitBucket and cloned repos for projects for the language of choice, build them, run the tests.<p>Also, <a href="https://github.com/search" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/search</a> and lookup stuff of similar topic / using the same libraries (words like MIT, ISC, Apache 2, BSD are a good sign). Then check if it's permissively licensed. Also, in the end, you likely won't ever end up forking or copying. You're just getting the knowledge of how it's glued, and probably will wire stuff in uniquely for your case.<p>Building these projects in itself teaches the ropes of getting an environment setup (googling build errors, checking issue tracker), dependencies, test suites, and building a production-ready package.<p>I kept the best projects I found at <a href="https://github.com/tony/.dot-config/blob/master/.vcspull.yaml" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tony/.dot-config/blob/master/.vcspull.yam...</a>. Purely for studying the source of.<p>Python : Flask, Werkzeug, Django, SQLAlchemy<p>JS : Express, Backbone, blog posts by Addy Osmani and JS enterprise architecture and Derick Bailey on Marionette (but i don't think the backbone would be as relevant today, it def paved the way to modern frontend we see today)<p>C++ : OpenTTD<p>In the end, there weren't many books I found espoused building projects. I already had an idea of what to build - I just needed enough to "ramp up", but if you want books:<p>JavaScript Patterns: Build Better Applications with Coding and Design Patterns<p>Examples applied directly to the task at hand. All about scoping.<p>A python book, that hits different areas than this JS book would be <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python</i>: <a href="https://docs.python-guide.org/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.python-guide.org/</a><p>C++: Scott Meyer books are great<p>General programming: Code Complete