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Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

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Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#121

Post by amirkdv »

(1) Real Mathematical Analysis, by Charles Pugh is a wonderful introduction to pure mathematics for a mathematically inclined engineer. The back cover starts like this

> Was plane geometry your favourite math course in high school? Did you like proving theorems? Are you sick of memorising integrals?

(2) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. I think it's impossible to read this (or a number of other works of Sacks') and not be mesmerized by the workings of the human brain. Disclaimer: I wouldn't call neuroscience my "field of study" even though I did study it.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#122

Post by spindle »

Errancer wrote: post #29

I would go with "Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical" by Lakatos, its a dialog-form history of defining Euler's formula and it shows the human side of mathematics as a science. I think its great as math has this unique status as providing with undoubtable knowledge but history shows that human error is possible even in this field. Alternately "The Unreality of Time" by McTaggart, it has less than 20 pag…

I second Lakatos, but more general introductions to philosophy that I always recommend are

Simon Blackburn: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (not intended as an introduction but IMO it makes a really fun introduction)

Thomas Nagel: What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#123

Post by copperx »

unoti wrote: post #84

"Deep Learning for Coders" (aka Fastai) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/deep-learning-for/97814... This book will take you from knowing nothing other than high school algenbra to knowing both practical applications and theoretical foundations and best practices for AI. If you're interested in AI and machine learning, you need this book.

Is there any truth to the Amazon comment that says that the code in the book is outdated?

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#124

Post by halo »

rsfern wrote: post #31

Materials Science: Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik https://archive.org/details/StuffMatters Very accessible and fun to read, and the book is structured around introducing a lot of fundamental materials science concepts in the context of everyday objects (silverware, chocolate, etc)

There was a 3-part BBC TV series by the author called "How It Works" which convered essentially the same material which I far preferred to the book - I don't have a stream link, unfortunately.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#125

Post by Zachsa999 »

copperx wrote: post #123
unoti wrote: post #84

"Deep Learning for Coders" (aka Fastai) https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/deep-learning-for/97814... This book will take you from knowing nothing other than high school algenbra to knowing both practical applications and theoretical foundations and best practices for AI. If you're interested in AI and machine learning, you need this book.

Is there any truth to the Amazon comment that says that the code in the book is outdated?

No. Video is not a sustainable learning medium.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#126

Post by westoncb »

triyambakam wrote: post #66
pxska wrote: post #4

A very tough question. I feel that it might be quite hard to lure a curious person into Computer Science, who doesn't know anything about the field yet. One of the books I liked (since I actually studied Linguistics in my Bachelor's) and what drew me towards CS was "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold.

What about a book for Linguistics? I also studied Linguistics and now while I still find the knowledge useful (getting to describe to my son a voiced vs unvoiced plosive) I am not as interested in it anymore.

For general linguistics I've enjoyed a couple small books by Frank Palmer: "Grammar" and "Semantics".

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#127

Post by michaelwm »

ipnon wrote: post #83

PiHKAL by Alexander and Ann Shulgin is on its face a book about love and chemistry. Taken together it becomes more of a treatise on how psychopharmacology is a method of personal and sociological analysis. Drug use becomes a psychological tool to manifest the phenomena of the mind that are normally hidden, and novel synthesis becomes a tool to then access the areas of the mind unexplored throughout history. Aside of…

You've said everything I could ever say about PiHKAL; it's a masterpiece. TiHKAL, published three years after the Shulgin's lab was raided by the DEA, is also a fantastic read.

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#128

Post by temp8964 »

coder-3 wrote: post #97
H8crilA wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've observed is population growth control - be it reducing the growth or encouraging growth - always fails miserably. For example many people have heard of the one child policy in China, but the facts are that both the introduction and the removal of the policy had no perceptible effect on fertility rates.

Interesting. Do you have a good source for this? Googling it is just the same (Chinese source) line repeated over and over: > National Health and Family Planning Commission spokesman Mao Qunan said the agency’s work had reduced the number of births in China over the years by “400 million”. Nothing much about the effect of the removal of the policy either.

The reduce of population is not the effect of the policy, but the effect of economic growth. It would have happened without the policy. On the other hand, the policy created tons of horrible human rights violations, such as forced abortion against the mother’s will and gave her the dead body of her child. http://funtobebad.blogspot.com/2012/06/china-forces-seven-mo...

Re: Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?

#130

Post by rsfern »

halo wrote: post #124
rsfern wrote: post #31

Materials Science: Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik https://archive.org/details/StuffMatters Very accessible and fun to read, and the book is structured around introducing a lot of fundamental materials science concepts in the context of everyday objects (silverware, chocolate, etc)

There was a 3-part BBC TV series by the author called "How It Works" which convered essentially the same material which I far preferred to the book - I don't have a stream link, unfortunately.

Cool! I hadn’t seen the series before. Seems like it predates the book actually, which I wasn’t really expecting

I haven’t found a streaming link yet, but these (related?) clips look pretty interesting https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hkyfr/clips

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