41–50 of 137 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses. It's a terrible waste.
>Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses. And swinging a bat is one of the skills baseball players need to use for their job. The comment you replied to was talking about skills that are not going to be used every day. So I don't think your analogy is very useful.
Too true. Peopleware did not live up to my expectations. It's very light on evidence, has the chapter flow of a monthly-newsletter-turned-book, and contradicts itself in a few places without blinking an eye.
It's language specific but I would recommend eloquent Ruby. One of the most engaging programming books I've read
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JDMPOK2/
Takes you from simple mechanical switches all the way to a CPU.
Luu says regarding the Little Book of Semaphores : "If I’m writing grungy low-level threading code today, I’m overwhelmingly like to be using c++11 threading primitives, so I’d like something that uses those instead of semaphores," But as someone whose lowest-level experience of concurrency is with APIs similar to the C++ primitives (which are not that different from pthreads), I disagree. I found it a real eye-opene…
(Frequently I ended up just implementing semaphores, and then doing everything else in terms of those, frequently using a standard library I had precisely for that purpose...)
(Embedded device flashback moment: a mobile phone OS where the only concurrency primitive was a mutex, each of which contained a fixed-size buffer of waiting tasks. The size of the buffer was smaller than the number of tasks on the system, and if a task blocked on the mutex while the buffer was fill, another task would randomly wake up.)
I often here comments about finishing a mathematical/technical book over the course of a "few" weekends. But I don't see how thats possible if it includes completing all (or even most of) the given exercises. Especially when you have a full-time job.
Over the weekend? I can't do it. Even if I forced myself to read for 6 hours Saturday and Sunday I'd forget everything during the weekdays. An hour or so every day is much better and realistic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
&
context based learning --> https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word
https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-18-001-calculus-online-tex...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't believe in knowledge for the sake of enjoying the perspective that more knowledge gives you?
I do, but with a kid my time is now limited. Unused knowledge has this habit of being forgotten. It turns out to be a terrible waste, at least from my POV.
If you are a software engineer, you can pretty much use linear algebra, calculus, algorithms in your dayjob, right there! Even if you write CRUD apps or the xth tower defense on android. It's all bytes and numbers and numbers stored in bytes and asymptotic behaviour and relational algebra and type systems and transistors, it just depends on how deep you want to look.
I often here comments about finishing a mathematical/technical book over the course of a "few" weekends. But I don't see how thats possible if it includes completing all (or even most of) the given exercises. Especially when you have a full-time job.
I think such books are pointless if you aren't going to use them in your day-to-day work.