Habr is strong with comments. Therefore, when I wrote the topic “

Have you dreamed of interactive books? I know a person who is making them right now

“, he hoped that readers would help find similar examples. The result exceeded expectations.

So, meet Amit Patel and his

interactive articles

at the intersection of mathematics, algorithms and programming. A small disclaimer: since I can’t embed interactive illustrations on Habr, I’ll use animated gifs. Some of them can be difficult.

To understand what this author’s Amit is, let’s turn to the most comprehensive and clear text devoted to hexagonal grids. The author says he has been collecting approaches to working with hexagonal grids for over 25 years and shares the most elegant approaches. It looks something like this:

Note that when you click on the button that changes the location of the hexagon, the code example in the lower left corner also changes.

And then, as the text progresses, the interactivity of the illustrations only increases:


In 2017, a translation of this guide, authored by the respected PatientZero, was published on Habre (by the way, a person made a huge contribution to the translations of algorithms by posting them on Habre. Reading this alone takes 25 minutes). However, no matter how talented “patient zero”, his translation loses a lot due to the lack of interactivity (it is clear that otherwise it would not have been transferred to Khabr). In addition, the author successively updated the text in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, so the translation is losing its relevance a little.

So who is Amit Patel? In 2002, he graduated from Stanford University, studying the theory of programming languages. His main job is, as you might guess, programming, preferring Java. In the past, I was engaged in construction, while the current work, as far as I understand, is not related to games.

As a hobby creates such tutorials. If you look at Amit’s topics, most of them are related to game design in one way or another. Probably, the new place of work will lead to parsing and other algorithms, but so far the most obvious ones are gaming ones. For example, below is another text dedicated to the algorithm for finding the shortest path among circular obstacles (original, translated by PatientZero):

To create interactive articles, Amit Patel used HTML+CSS+JS connection, working with the framework

d3.js v4

. However, in recent works, he switched to

Vue.js v2

. This allows him to make interactive illustrations like this:

Since simply using the framework would be too boring for Amit, he wrote

mini tutorial

which illustrates how illustrations can be drawn in the spirit of those he uses in his explanations.

Instead of an afterword:

As an IT person, I am always looking for new ideas and solutions to improve my skills. Websites and courses are, of course, a great source of information, but interactive sites like those that create

Amit Patel

and

Bartosz Tsekhanovskyi

– This is really Next Level. We see what educational materials can be and what articles in serious publications can be, for example.

If you know of resources like the ones above, please share them in the comments. So if you suddenly want to put a plus in karma for this material – it’s up to Dmytro.