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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?

#141

Post by djmips »

This was early for me but after high school and before tackling more math I found Keith Devlin's book 'Mathematics: The Science of Patterns' answered questions that were never covered in high school and put mathematics into a place where I could then thrive and learn more.

For me, I wish more history of mathematics was mixed into the mathematics being taught.

Also, this could be a good book to read at any juncture.

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

#144

Post by alejohausner »

Strangely enough, I took a whole degree in mathematics, and never felt comfortable with the epsilon-delta proofs for limits. It was only by reading Everything and More a Compact History of Infinity, by, of all people, David Foster Wallace that I understood the motivation behind it!

He explains how the ideas of infinity were developed, and which paradoxes and absurdities forced 19th century mathematicians like Cauchy to put the whole thing on a more rigorous footing.

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

#145

Post by ajoseps »

xitrium wrote: post #88

Statistical Rethinking is the first book that helped me make sense of statistical modeling (and probability as applied to modeling): https://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/ Huge fan, can't recommend enough.

did you go through the course or used the book independently? I got a couple of chapters in but fell off

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

#146

Post by jerrygenser »

Andrew Ng's machine learning course on Coursera from almost 10 years changed the trajectory of my entire career.

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-in...

Statistical rethinking by Richard McElreath also helped me to understand bayesian analysis and simulation -- possibly the best hands on bayesian analysis book for beginners

https://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/

edit: added links

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

#148

Post by luuuzeta »

I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else:

* Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ

* The Story of Asynchronous JavaScript - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rivBfgaEyWQ

* JavaScript Callbacks, Promises, and Async / Await Explained - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRNToFh3hxU

* Async Javascript Tutorial For Beginners (Callbacks, Promises, Async Await). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8gHHBlbziw

* Jake Archibald: In The Loop - setTimeout, micro tasks, requestAnimationFrame, requestIdleCallback, - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOL7MC4Pl0

Edit... I've been rewatching these videos, reading the MDN docs, the Eloquent JavaScript book, javascript.info, blogs about the subject, etc. This further proves you shouldn't limit yourself to a single resource, and instead fill up the laguna with water from different sources if you will.

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

#149

Post by AlwaysRock »

gwbas1c wrote: post #119

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It (Michael E. Gerber) What it taught me is that effective organizations invest heavily in training newcomers how to do their jobs / processes. I see this everywhere; when I walk into a business and something's "just off," it's almost always because management is dropping the ball on training newcomers how to do their jobs. In my specific…

My first question for recruiters is always about how a company trains/mentors employees. I have gotten maybe 5 good responses out of the 100's of times I've asked that question.

It's shocking to me. Every employee you hire is going to have to be trained on SOMETHING that is new to them or specific to your company. Why dont companies spend more time developing onboarding and training programs that actually work?

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

#150

Post by SilasX »

projektfu wrote: post #18
meltyness wrote: post #6

Obviously if you're doing anything with a computer, Patterson & Hennesy is a must-read.

In that vein, The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles. https://www.nand2tetris.org/

Yep, I did nand2tetris on Coursera and it really filled in my intuition for how computers work. It felt like a black box, going from "logic operations" to "the machinery that allows you to write a hello world function that does something", and nand2tetris filled in that gap, building up from how you can persist addressable memory, to how you have a cycle for executing instructions, to how you can have control flow work calling functions and remembering where they came from, to how high-level languages can be translated into low-level code. Very enlightening!
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