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Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#471

Post by kerryoco »

the original Processing textbook: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262028288/

I don't know if the code is still executable with current Processing, but this book enabled me to finally start my own self-learning coding journey. It's basically a visual introduction to programming.

10 years ago I was figuring out what to do with my life, knew that I liked the idea of coding, but had found the Comp Sci curriculum at my college a bad fit at the time, and disheartening.

I finally took this book on my own, and spent a bit of time every morning.

The emphasis on design set it apart from so much of the other material I was coming across in trying to get started.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#472

Post by AlwaysRock »

tsycho wrote: post #188
AlwaysRock wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first question for recruiters is always about how a company trains/mentors employees. I have gotten maybe 5 good responses out of the 100's of times I've asked that question. It's shocking to me. Every employee you hire is going to have to be trained on SOMETHING that is new to them or specific to your company. Why dont companies spend more time developing onboarding and training programs that actually work?

While your question itself is good, it's unfortunately quite likely that the recruiters won't actually know the answer. So their answer isn't a good signal. Separately, in larger companies, there will be significant variance between the onboarding process of teams/orgs.

Sure. Recruiters wont know the answers to a lot of questions. Especially things that are not talked about often or focused on at the company. If a company is proud of their internal training program they would highlight that to potential employees and anything a recruiter can use to sell the company they will.

It's true that a recruiter might not know about a companies training program and that program may exist and actually be good. But its much more likely they wont know because one either doesnt exist or isnt formalized at all and isnt a focus for the company.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#473

Post by AlwaysRock »

swyx wrote: post #315
AlwaysRock wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first question for recruiters is always about how a company trains/mentors employees. I have gotten maybe 5 good responses out of the 100's of times I've asked that question. It's shocking to me. Every employee you hire is going to have to be trained on SOMETHING that is new to them or specific to your company. Why dont companies spend more time developing onboarding and training programs that actually work?

what counts to you as a good response?

"Hey! Yeah we actually have a 4 week 'bootcamp' that all our new hires swe go through that covers some of the basics of the technology we use, like (name xyz tech), and how we do sprint planning yada yada. You'll also complete a small project with your 'bootcamp' partners in week 4 before being onboarded to your new team."

That is probably the best that I've seen.

Also at a smaller company something like:

"The first week all new hires go through insert specific industry training so you have a good understanding of the lingo and terminology we use here. This will also help you understand our business better and how your work impacts that. After that you will be paired with a mentor, separate from your actual manager, who can help answer any questions as the get up and running."

Even if all of that is nonsense and a waste of time it shows that a company cares and is trying and thinking about onboarding and training. Most companies are not, or at least are not in any formalized way.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#474

Post by AlwaysRock »

fn-mote wrote: post #421
xkgt wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any tips or guides for creating good training programs? I find it challenging to think from a newcomer point of view and I significantly underestimate their challenges. Consequently I feel the learning curve I set for the team is either too steep or too shallow. This happens to me irrespective of whether I went through the painful learning curve just recently or several years in the past. Once I am comfor…

One issue I've seen is: assign the job to someone with experience as a instructor/mentor. A friend recently told me the story of a very predictable train wreck at his company... management knew he had the background to do a good job with the training, but that wasn't the priority I guess. End result estimated to be ~3 person years wasted because of a lack of good training/process onboarding/mentoring. The newcomers w…

That is incredibly common. The company will write it off as the employees fault when often more support early on could save both sides a lot of issues.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#475

Post by ushercakes »

Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide

Really helped me out when studying for interviews at first. As a visual learner, this was just great. The examples are very basic but pretty foundational and give you a good base to expand on in further preparation.

I work at the rainforest company. I credit that book majorly for helping me pass the algorithm rounds.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#476

Post by signaru »

foooobaba wrote: post #247

3blue1brown linear algebra + the linear algebra chapter from “all the math you missed but need to know for graduate school” - linear algebra and abstract vector spaces in general finally feel familiar. Also, timbuktu manuscripts - showed a history that I had never really heard of. These are written manuscripts of african scholars which are hundreds of years old, and still exist today. Some record the history of great…

Jeffrey Chasnov's linear algebra courses when you want to get your hands dirty. I made my first matrix inversion code after watching his videos. His videos are not code, but instead just going through and explaining process without skipping any details such that you'd understand enough to code it. He does many linear algebra examples by hand on a writing board which ends up more engaging than the typical slideshow that tends to skip the "tedious" details.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkZjai-2Jcxlg-Z1roB0p...

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#477

Post by chris_wot »

tinco wrote: post #435
chris_wot wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, what makes you think that all religions lead to the same destination?

They all exist in a common reality. We're going somewhere no matter what we believe right?

Somewhere has never meant the same destination.

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#479

Post by arendtio »

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie [1]

It made me realize how deeply emotional humans are. I always saw humans as mostly rational beings which sometimes loose control. However, after listening to that book I saw that the opposite is the case: We are 80% emotional beings and sometimes we manage to act somewhat rational.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...

Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?

#480

Post by dhosek »

DeathArrow wrote: post #453
dhosek wrote: post #411

Going back to the 90s, it wasn’t until I read Mark Nelson’s book on STL that object-oriented programming made sense to me. Part of it also was that the people writing books on C++ back then probably didn’t understand OOP either, so most of the books were essentially talking about C, but with different syntax for comments and I/O. With STL, suddenly the whole concept of OO made sense to me. When I started picking up f…

OOP does not make sense to me. I understand it, I use it when I have to, but things like encapsulation and inheritance don't make sense to me. In my experience they tend to over complicate things, spread state in multiple places so it becomes hard to follow and make the software more brittle. If null was 1 billion dollars mistake, to paraphrase Tony Hoare, OOP was at least 2 billion dollars mistake.

A lot of confusion comes down to some bad use of inheritance. Probably the most important OO concept is the Liskov Substitution Principal, viz that if you specify a superclass in a certain place, then any subclass should be a valid use there. The strategy pattern (or its hyperpituitary cousin, IoC) takes advantage of this to allow for run-time change of behaviors, e.g., being able to choose through configuration how to serialize a data structure so the same basic logic can output, say, a dataset as a table or a graph. That said, as OO architecture has matured over the last few decades, there has definitely been a tendency to favor composition over inheritance for code flexibility.

I would recommend Head-First Design Patterns as another great book for being able to “get” object-oriented architecture.

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