Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 515 posts

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

#221

Post by adityam582y »

After trying out various courses, playlists to learn, I found clicks by reading these sources:

Data Science https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17912916-data-science-fo...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/148009.The_Elements_of_S...

German language https://smartergerman.com/

Job Interview Prep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24263660-why-you

A better sense of world funny read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/944652.Poor_Charlie_s_Al...

Searching a Mentor: find here https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36200111-tribe-of-mentor...

Writing (Academic and other types) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39874447-how-to-write-a-...

Better finance mindset https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/78427.The_Total_Money_Ma...

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

#222

Post by ceedon »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #55

Recursion: SICP and later The Little Schemer. Abstraction barriers: SICP Continuations: The Little Schemer Decision Trees: Uni. of. Washington MOOC about classification and retrieval and later implementing them myself in Racket and later GNU Guile.

Can't agree more. The Little Schemer took me from "getting it" at a conceptual level to really knowing how to use recursion to get stuff done. Super important for grokking data structures imo.

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

#223

Post by noufalibrahim »

A few of them.

1. This book made all the patchwork ideas I had about the incompleteness theorem fall into place and click while I was doing my bachelors https://www.amazon.in/Godels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel/dp/081475837...

2. This similarly solidified a lot of patchwork ideas I had about money https://www.amazon.com/Money-Unauthorized-Biography-Coinage-...

3. This didn't make the topic click but it shed light on the entire landscape after which anything I read on unicode made sense and filled up my mental map of the whole area https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...

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

#224

Post by Brendinooo »

“React.js Introduction For People Who Know Just Enough jQuery To Get By” met me exactly where I was at and made React click for me. Forever grateful that it existed when it did; it went away, not sure if anyone has an updated version of it.

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

#226

Post by Shorel »

xutopia wrote: post #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.

I personally have an enormous debt from my perception of the world to Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

It's not simply a world view absent of supernatural forces. Yes, it is that, but at the same time it is much more.

It's a world of discovery. It's a world of curiosity. It's a world of wonder and imagination. It's a world of exploration.

And the way to properly search for questions is first to stop pretending we already have all the answers, like religion does. I find almost every religious comment and answer so... reductionistic, so simplistic, so pompous, so pretentious, it kind of kills the mood of discovery and curiosity.

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

#227

Post by m4r71n »

Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl! I was fresh out of college where I literally memorized certain regular expression patterns for a Unix class exam just to pass. It was only when I started an actual job in development did I realize what a powerful tool regexes are and was recommended this book. It explained everything so clearly and easily that to this day I love regular expressions.

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

#228

Post by luuuzeta »

electrondood wrote: post #168
luuuzeta wrote: post #148

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 Asynchr…

The event loop one was a must-watch video for anyone who write Javascript. It even secured me a job offer.

I'd argue that you cannot understand asynchronous programming in JS without knowing how the call stack in the JS engine, web APIs (provided by the browser or NodeJS as far as I know), the callback/(macro)task queue, microtask queue, and the event loop all fit together. The JS engine is a small component of that entire environment, and not being aware of it is like walking in the dark with dim candle.

The fact I didn't know about these concepts is the reason why I always struggled to understand examples involving setTimeout, setInterval, etc.

Most videos on YouTube, even from well-known personalities in the programming YouTube community, simply jump into things without context at all even when the videos are titled "for beginners". Even some books and docs simply describe the spec without providing context and motivation.

Edit... Forgot to say Philip does an outstanding job in that video. He's even humble enough to admit it took him a few months to grasp what was going on.

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

#229

Post by forbiddenvoid »

1. Peter Norvig's Design of Computer Programs course on Udacity probably singlehandedly changed my perspective on thinking and modeling software solutions to problems.

https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...

2. Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom is of similar quality. There are a lot of 'oh that's how that works' moments in this book.

https://craftinginterpreters.com/

3. Doyle Brunson's Super System 2 is of a similar nature, but for poker. It's outdated these days because the nature of the game has changed so much due to the internet and a shift in meta strategy, but it's really insightful in understanding the human aspects of the game. His perspective as a 'gambler' rather than poker player is also unique, because he talks a lot about prop bets and identifying when you have an edge in a bet.

4. Stephen King's "On Writing" is a masterpiece of a memoir of a man and his craft. My own writing improved significantly as a result of this book.

Post reply on HN