Computer Science from Scratch:Build Interpreter, Art, Emulators and ML in Python (nostarch.com)

David Kopec’s new book, Computer Science from Scratch, offers experienced Python programmers a project-driven tour through core CS concepts. A free sample—Chapter 5, “Building a CHIP‑8 Virtual Machine”—is available to download. Rather than abstract lectures, the book uses focused, hands‑on projects (a BASIC interpreter, an NES emulator, algorithmic graphics, and a compact K‑Nearest Neighbors classifier) to expose how languages are parsed and evaluated, how processors execute instructions, how images are represented and manipulated, and how simple ML models make decisions. For the AI/ML community this approach is practical and important: building a BASIC interpreter teaches parsing, AST construction and evaluation; the CHIP‑8 and NES emulator projects demonstrate CPU cycles, memory mapping and I/O timing that matter for performance-sensitive systems; graphics chapters clarify pixel pipelines and data representations; and implementing a readable KNN demystifies distance metrics, feature scaling and decision logic. These foundations help ML engineers reason about numerical stability, runtime behavior, low‑level bottlenecks, and model interpretability. The book finishes each chapter with real‑world context and exercises, making it a compact, code-first way to deepen systems intuition that directly benefits model design, debugging and optimization.