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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?

#91
post #39

Gilbert Strang's lectures on Linear Algebra: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010... LinAlg was the only maths course I needed in my interdisciplinary study program. I had struggled to grasp maths in high school, but these lectures really made it click for me and I passed my university's class with a B+.

When I was an undergrad math major, linear algebra was one of those general foundations math classes that students from all the science majors were in. Because of that they had to teach a lot of sections of it, and that meant grad students lecturing it. The class was kind of a mess, but luckily professor Strang had these lectures up online even back then (2003 probably). Who knows how I would have done in that class without them, they really saved me at the time.

I should revisit them, I remember them being great!

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

#92
https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages - recursion, and how to apply it, and functional programming in general clicked for after this course.

Also Code Complete - after reading I finally understood what good code should look like.

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

#94
post #39

Gilbert Strang's lectures on Linear Algebra: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010... LinAlg was the only maths course I needed in my interdisciplinary study program. I had struggled to grasp maths in high school, but these lectures really made it click for me and I passed my university's class with a B+.

I used this to get up to speed when taking Machine Learning grad courses, having never took a Linear Algebra course in high school or undergrad.

Along with the wonderful MIT videos! Just a man and a chalkboard, explaining the core insights and relationships behind linear algebra concepts.

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

#97
I know this is a little out of left field but I couldn't understand why anyone was Atheist until I read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan... quickly followed by The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Those two books together crystallized in me what it could mean to have a world view absent of supernatural forces.

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

#98
I didn’t understand probability, until I read E T Jaynes Probability Theory: Logic of Science

It defines the base blocks of probability very, very slow. And never hand-waves anything. But it’s the “bayesian” view of probability; but it’s honestly the easier one to understand.

https://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-Science-T-Jaynes/d...

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

#99
- Feynmans Lectures (Physics)

- The Selfish Gene (Evolution)

- 3blue1brown (Maths)

- Primer (Evolution simulations) [https://www.youtube.com/c/PrimerLearning]

- W2AEW's Back to the Basics electronics tutorials [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkd_RnSvfYAjSHPGBvA-K...]

- Jonathan Clayden's Organic Chemistry (I hate orgchem. This is one of the few books I can stand.)

- Many more I can't recall now.

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

#100
post #8

Brent Yorgey's Introduction to Haskell: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis1940/spring13/ Rudin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis" is a brilliantly lucid introduction to the topic that takes a completely unconventional approach.

Fun anecdote about the first: I was working through the course and dropped into an IRC chatroom to ask for help with one of the homework assignments. Someone gave me some helpful pointers that guided me to solving the question. Only realised later that it was Yorgey himself!
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