Program For Fun

Program for fun (in Thai)

Program For Fun is my current book. This is the first draft version December 2010. It describes a design and development of a computer language and its compiler.  Here is the excerpt from the preface:

Programming is enjoyable 

To study programming is to do programming. Program is an interesting artifact that can be very fascinating.  The best way to learn is to enjoy it by doing it.  This book will introduce you to a journey of creating a computer language.  The story tells an evolution of a computer language, its internal working mechanism and the ideas behind it. The medium of this journey is a computer language and its accompany source code and executable code, called Som language.  All the materials can be found at:
http://www.cp.eng.chula.ac.th/~piak/project/som/index.htm

Programming is still an art 

It requires skill which is acquired through a lot of practice.  Its foundation lays in mathematics.  The study of programs as an object in itself is interesting and useful.  By such study we can understand more thoroughly the relationship between a program and the result we want it to accomplish.  It is my intension in this short writing to initiate you towards the study of programs.  Hopefully, to give you some insight into programming but my higher hope is to make you appreciate programs as beautiful man-made objects.

P. Chongstitvatana
Chulalongkorn University, 2010

There are several formats:
Read on line
PDF book format
e-book mobi format  can be read on any e-book reader (but I optimise it for Kindle)

last update 24 July 2014