About this book

The Visual SWE Book is a free, growing collection of software engineering concepts explained through short prose, plain language, and hand-built animated visualizations — the kind of diagram you'd sketch on a whiteboard, brought to life. New concepts are added over time; the table of contents already lists everything planned, so you can see what's coming next.

Every concept also asks something of you, because reading alone rarely sticks: a prediction to make before you watch the visualization, a small exercise that extends the page's code, and a few questions where every answer, right or wrong, comes with its reasoning. The questions you miss come back on the review page after a day, then three, then seven.

It's built with Astro and a small visualization engine written from scratch in TypeScript — no charting library, no framework. The prose and code samples are co-written with Claude, Anthropic's AI model, then reviewed and edited for accuracy.

Your reading progress — which concepts you've marked complete — is stored only in your browser's local storage. So is your review schedule: the "Check yourself" questions you miss, and when each one is due back on the review page. Nothing else about your answers is kept. Nothing is sent to a server, there are no accounts, and clearing your browser data clears your progress too.