Computer Science From Scratch

Building Interpreters, Art, Emulators and ML in Python

by David Kopec

Fall 2025, 272 pp.

ISBN-13:

9781718504301

Computer science can feel unapproachable for those without a formal CS education. Computer Science From Scratch pulls back that curtain, illuminating foundational CS concepts through creative, hands-on projects.

Each of the 7 projects is presented as a code-centric tutorial that gently introduces topics like interpreters, emulators, and machine learning without getting bogged down by complex theory. The projects showcase advanced Python language features and clean code principles while exploring interesting algorithms.

Chapters conclude with discussions of real-world applications of the topic and proposed exercises to extend the reader’s skills. Covers Python 3.x

Author Bio

David Kopec is an associate professor of computer science at Champlain College. He is the author of five programming books, including the Classic Computer Science Problems series, and spent several years as an iOS developer for startups. In addition to his teaching work, David is an avid podcaster and indie app developer with an MS in Computer Science from Dartmouth and an EMBA from Quantic.

Table of contents

Introduction

Part I: Interpreters
Chapter 1: The Smallest Possible Programming Language
Chapter 2: Writing a BASIC Interpreter

Part II: Computational Art
Chapter 3: Retro Image Processing
Chapter 4: A Stochastic Painting Algorithm

Part III: Emulators
Chapter 5: Building a CHIP-8 Virtual Machine
Chapter 6: Emulating the NES Game Console

Part IV: Super Simple Machine Learning
Chapter 7: Classification with K-Nearest Neighbors
Chapter 8: Regression with K-Nearest Neighbors

Afterword
Appendix: Bitwise Operations

The chapters in red are included in this Early Access PDF.

Extra Stuff

A repository of code and errata for this title can be found at the book's GitHub page.