Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–38 of 38 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#31

Post by jl2718 »

s1t5 wrote: post #20
jl2718 wrote: post #15

I like textbooks for this. I can’t find them anymore for new things I’m interested in. For instance, there is no decent textbook on modern machine learning. Prior to 2014 they were great. Programming books in general seem way too narrow and quickly become obsolete.

> For instance, there is no decent textbook on modern machine learning. Prior to 2014 they were great. Do you mean books on theory or on language-specific libraries? Either way I can think of many examples. Also, the pre-2014 books are still very relevant - it's only deep learning that has seen significant developments since then.

Theory and language-agnostic algorithmic implementation generally is appropriate for 'intermediate' level to my understanding. Read PRML or MLaPP, and then please tell me that you know of a suitable modern successor. Not Goodfellow. Sorry Ian.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#32

Post by s1t5 »

jl2718 wrote: post #31
s1t5 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, there is no decent textbook on modern machine learning. Prior to 2014 they were great. Do you mean books on theory or on language-specific libraries? Either way I can think of many examples. Also, the pre-2014 books are still very relevant - it's only deep learning that has seen significant developments since then.

Theory and language-agnostic algorithmic implementation generally is appropriate for 'intermediate' level to my understanding. Read PRML or MLaPP, and then please tell me that you know of a suitable modern successor. Not Goodfellow. Sorry Ian.

That's my second point though - why do you think that PRML and MLaPP need a modern successor at all?

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#33

Post by mydongle »

duxup wrote: post #24
jamil7 wrote: post #5

One theory of mine is there is far more self promotion in the developer community now than there was when I started. In particular javascript and web development juniors writing blog posts and dev.to articles as a form of self promotion. On the other end of the spectrum are domain experts who make video courses or books on advanced topics. In the intermediate level you have a big gap with not a whole lot of informati…

As someone 2 years into a web development career. I get really frustrated by this. I'll fire up a tutorial on something and 20 minutes into this and I'm all "yeah this does what it says, but it can't be used to do almost anything else..." and I fear the actual person doing the tutorial doesn't know. Heck I've commented on some Medium blogs where they mention how to do a thing and I'm 100% sure in any real world that…

When trying to learn html/css and following multiple tutorials with different ways to achieve one thing, it truly feels like I'm just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Sometimes nothing sticks. It's incredibly frustrating. Is there someone who writes tutorials who can actually explain what they're doing and why? Maybe something will work, but I'm not sure if anyone learned anything valuable from that kind of experience.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#34

Post by syedmeesamali »

kashfi wrote: post #2

https://hi.hyperskill.org/ ^This might be a good place to learn the intermediate stuff. Python, Java, Kotlin. More intermediate stuff goes into the data structures and algorithms. https://sp19.datastructur.es/ ^UCB's Josh Hug is a good lecturer, also provides course textbook, hw, side projects. For best practices, try to get the Head First Design Patterns PDF. Common mistakes? Search for "Effective " and you should f…

Just checked goalkicker.com. Pure gem for intermediate level. Excellent sharing.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#35

Post by semicolonandson »

This is a need I'm hoping to address with my latest project, Semicolon&Sons. Basically I've built and maintained a web app business for the past ten years and can share a ton of war stories about how certain architectural decisions either paid off or bit me in the ass. Because I own the copyright to the code, there's no red tape stopping me from showing it on camera or whatever.

As regards educational content, I'm at an early stage with this, but I've got a couple of videos over on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ

As for your question as to why there are so few intermediate level learning resources, I think it's because the market size for intermediate stuff is much much smaller than it is for beginner resources and therefore content creators prefer to focus on the beginner stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#36

Post by erikpl »

hackermailman wrote: post #12

Universities all have these kinds of intermediate courses: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/17313/2018/#schedule is an example of general software architecture like how to identify requirements. Notice all the books on architecture and design being referenced as well. There's startup architecture courses floating around too: https://cmu-17-356.github.io/ For exploring some huge codebase where there is no design docum…

Do you have more information about that startups course? Looks very promising by the looks of it, but the resources they provide in the schedule section are a bit sparse :p

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#37

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

I think most of the intermediate to hard concepts, best practices, etc. are usually learned on the job as you run into problems and solve them. I would also guess that more of the advanced things tend to be on the backend. A todo list application front end built from a tutorial will likely scale for one user or thousands of concurrent users.

The other aspect of advanced is how to maintain an application and write it so its easier to maintain. Once something is live, how you get changes in, fix bugs, monitor, etc. is not really talked about online because it is boring. It is a combo of process, tooling and some tech.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#38

Post by duxup »

mydongle wrote: post #33
duxup wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone 2 years into a web development career. I get really frustrated by this. I'll fire up a tutorial on something and 20 minutes into this and I'm all "yeah this does what it says, but it can't be used to do almost anything else..." and I fear the actual person doing the tutorial doesn't know. Heck I've commented on some Medium blogs where they mention how to do a thing and I'm 100% sure in any real world that…

When trying to learn html/css and following multiple tutorials with different ways to achieve one thing, it truly feels like I'm just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Sometimes nothing sticks. It's incredibly frustrating. Is there someone who writes tutorials who can actually explain what they're doing and why? Maybe something will work, but I'm not sure if anyone learned anything valuable from that ki…

CSS feels like such an add hoc mix of things that sometimes go together, other times don't.

I just hang onto some snippets I like and pick a framework most of the time.

Post reply on HN