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Comment by chapliboy | Hacker News Reader

The author says it took about 6 months to thoroughly go through the book and examples.

This is really useful in setting expectations.

I got through all chapters in around 1.5 months, spending 50-60 hours[1]. I'd do solid 4-5 hour blocks on Saturdays and Sundays when I was most into it.

I'm following teachyourselfcs.com[2], so I'm hoping to solidify the concepts the book intro'd by reimplementing the bytecode interpeter in Rust (rlox) and following Alex Aiken's lectures online. OP appears to have reimplemented Lox in Golang (glox) for reinforcement.

So far the time has been well spent. Compilers are now much more 'just another program', and I have new conceptual tools for tackling software engineering problems.

1. https://github.com/thundergolfer/uni/tree/main/books/craftin...

2. https://teachyourselfcs.com/#languages

Yes, you can go through the book in much less time than six months if you're more consistent with it than I was. I took a few breaks (for days and sometimes weeks) to study and write other things.

As another data point, I've taken about 1.5 months for Part 1 of the book, chipping away at it for 1-2 hours on weekday mornings.

Did you read Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective first? I read about 300 pages of it (maybe 200 only, I forget) and got _extremely_ bored. I want to read Crafting Interpreters but I'm concerned that Computer Systems is too much of a prerequisite.

I read the first 3 chapters and worked through the in-chapter exercises (not the end-of-chapter exercises). I think that’s about 150-200 pages.

Yeah it’s quite a slog. I think I averaged 10-20 min per page of progress. I intend to return and finish it but it will take me ages.

It’s not a prerequisite at all though. Crafting Interpreters is pretty high level, in comparison.

That's great to hear, thanks for the response! That sounds about as far as I got, so I think probably I was closer to 200 pages, not 300. It was just so incredibly boring. I was making it through maybe 4 pages a day if I was lucky. And all the material was so similar, it wasn't like you got through one part and then built upon it to something very different; it was more of the same with only a small difference. So no new-topic-energy-burst at the start of a new section.

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