I can entirely relate to what Lewis writes about reading Plato. I was interested in philosophy but found myself gravitating to reading and listening to podcasts about philosophy rather than reading it directly. Once I actually picked up a volume of Plato's works I was surprised how approachable it was to me, a complete layman of philosophy.
Same for me with Stoicism: I read everything modern book on it and while it was useful nothing comes close to when I actually decided to pick up the classics, starting with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
He also wrote a great book called Studies in Words about how the meaning of words change over time, apparently in similar ways in different languages. It was based on a series of lectures he gave students reading old texts, that they should not apply modern meaning to an old word: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Studies-Words-Canto-Classics-Lewis/...
If we were to apply this idea to computer science or software engineering, where would we draw the line between old and new books?
Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative. It's for fields where thoughts are evergreen (basically, anything to do with being human, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc) where this advice matters. A good modern book on math, or chemistry, or compiler construction has more knowledge than any old one. A good modern poet is not better than Shakespeare or Homer (and i…
Well-written technology books age quite well. For example, Hackers[0] has aged so well that the author has gone back over the last 30 years and added multiple appendices to cover what's happened since! The first couple chapters are available[1] on Project Gutenberg as well.
Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative. It's for fields where thoughts are evergreen (basically, anything to do with being human, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc) where this advice matters. A good modern book on math, or chemistry, or compiler construction has more knowledge than any old one. A good modern poet is not better than Shakespeare or Homer (and i…
The best geometry textbook hasn't changed for more than 2000 years. Mathematics textbooks are just as likely as anything else to suffer from modern pedagogical theories that have not been tested by time and will come to be regarded as mistakes.
Do you have a recommendation for best geometry textbook?
I can entirely relate to what Lewis writes about reading Plato. I was interested in philosophy but found myself gravitating to reading and listening to podcasts about philosophy rather than reading it directly. Once I actually picked up a volume of Plato's works I was surprised how approachable it was to me, a complete layman of philosophy.
The best geometry textbook hasn't changed for more than 2000 years. Mathematics textbooks are just as likely as anything else to suffer from modern pedagogical theories that have not been tested by time and will come to be regarded as mistakes.
Do you have a recommendation for best geometry textbook?
The best geometry textbook hasn't changed for more than 2000 years. Mathematics textbooks are just as likely as anything else to suffer from modern pedagogical theories that have not been tested by time and will come to be regarded as mistakes.
Do you have a recommendation for best geometry textbook?
I suspect 'inimino is referring to Euclid's "Elements"
This was life-changing for me. I wanted to learn about spirituality through a different lens than the Catholic upbringing that constrained my mind and the rampant "spirituality is synonymous with Christianity" that I find in the U.S. I went out and read a handful of ancient religious texts from all of the world. This led me to see that throughout the course of human history, tribes from all over the world have espous…
In the same way, every Catholic around me reads "Catholic" books written in the past 20 years that are 90% watered down and 10% quotes from older books. So imagine my surprise when I found all those old books they were quoting were easily available on archive.org and easily installable on my phone (the PDF copies only) and in easy to understand English translations, despite being written 200, 500, 1000, 1700 years ago. And compared to these older books, even the 150 year old books, these 20 year old books are nothing more than overpriced flowery pamphlets.
"The UNIX programming environment" by Kernighan and Pike will be cherished by computer scientists in 200 years, just like mathematicians today cherish Gauss' disquisitions on curves and surfaces. PHP, javascript, python will be long forgotten.
Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative. It's for fields where thoughts are evergreen (basically, anything to do with being human, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc) where this advice matters. A good modern book on math, or chemistry, or compiler construction has more knowledge than any old one. A good modern poet is not better than Shakespeare or Homer (and i…
Well-written technology books age quite well. For example, Hackers[0] has aged so well that the author has gone back over the last 30 years and added multiple appendices to cover what's happened since! The first couple chapters are available[1] on Project Gutenberg as well. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute... 1: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=7...