Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#51

Post by bewe42 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:16 AM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #25

stuxnet79 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been recommended a lot. I'm gonna buy it on Amazon and work through it slowly.

SICP is online for free (legally) from MIT's website, or there are some community version with cleaner layout. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13918465 I've only worked through Chapter 1. The text is interesting, but most of my learning has come from the exercises. You should plan to do the exercises. Also, don't worry if you have to skip a few exercises and come back to them later. Don't allow yourself to…

yes, no need to buy it.

and you are right, the value lies in the exercises. I started doing them in Clojure. I recommend doing as many as you can and then you'll find plenty of solutions online to compare your results. It's worth it

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#52

Post by dukeflukem » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:48 AM UTC

mattbgates wrote: post #40

Unfortunately, someone stole it from me, but it was an introduction to philosophy book that really opened up my mind, introducing philosphers including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Confuscious, Hobbes, Hume, Foucault, Kant, Kierkegaard, Lao Tzu, Locke, Marx, Mill, Rand, and more. It basically covered who they were, how they grew up, and what they've stated that has helped contribute to our society.…

There is something ironic about stealing a philosophy book!

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#53

Post by yesenadam » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 12:12 PM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #21

Strang's Linear Algebra: http://math.mit.edu/~gs/linearalgebra/ Concise, clear, thorough. Strang is a great author.

I watched so far the first 7 or 8 lectures on youtube of his linear algebra course. (Which something like a million people have watched) He's such a great lecturer, extremely impressive. So mysteriously good it makes me wonder what it is about them that seem so good. He says somewhere about how he gets a lot of mail thanking him, that people appreciate that he's on their side. It's just done with what the experience is like for the student always in mind. Sounds simple, but there are plenty of lecture/course videos on youtube where that obviously wasn't given a thought.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#54

Post by yesenadam » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 12:34 PM UTC

Visual Complex Analysis - Needham. A lot of great pictures, exerything is explained (and shown) geometrically. Complex differentiation/integration, non-Euclidean geometry, vector fields etc.

Mathematics and its History - Stillwell. Wonderfully written. From the ancients to the 20th century, covers the mathematics (in a lot of detail) and lives of major mathematicians (potted bios).

Concrete Mathematics - Knuth et al. Discrete maths, number theory, generating functions, covers most of the maths that pops up continually in programming.

All You Wanted To Know About Mathematics But Were Afraid To Ask. Mathematics for Science Students 2 Vols. - Louis Lyons. Pretty basic, but covers all the mathematical basics for physics. (1st year uni level I guess) I learned a lot from this years ago, I still consult it as a reference. It's a pleasure to read.

Also, all of Hamming's books.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#55

Post by ayushgp » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC

stuxnet79 wrote: post #22

bewe42 wrote: post #5

SICP In case you didn't know, have a look at http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subj...

This has been recommended a lot. I'm gonna buy it on Amazon and work through it slowly.

There is an interactive version of that textbook you can read. It actually helps to do the exercises with the text. You can Google it. I read that book using that version and it was amazing.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#56

Post by ayushgp » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 2:04 PM UTC

stealthcat wrote: post #50

bobosha wrote: post #31

AI - A modern approach by Russell & Norvig. http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

How to use this book? My machine learning lab have few copies but nobody seems to be using it.

It's actually not all that useful for Machine learning and is more focused on other aspects of AI. It talks a lot about propositional logic, knowledge representation, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#57

Post by Tepix » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

The Camel book¹ is pretty fantastic.

I hope the "Learning Perl 6" book by brian d. foy will be as good. -- ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Perl

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#58

Post by badpun » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

Spivak's "Calculus".

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#59

Post by fiftyacorn » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 4:11 PM UTC

Not tech - but "German - A Structural Approach".

Its the only book i still have from uni. It breaks the language down, and made it easy for a techie like me to learn german. Can still speak a fair bit

Re: Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?

#60

Post by matt_the_bass » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

Hockenbrizzle wrote: post #43

matt_the_bass wrote: post #29

The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill It covers nearly all aspects of electronics both theory and practice. It’s still relevant after all these years.

I didn't learn electronics with this book, but I really wish I did. I used it to give tutorials for an undergraduate electronics course for physics students and it was immensely useful and well organized.

The work book that goes along with it is also top notch.