a book simply called 'low level programming'. sadly the thing that clicked is that i dont know shit about computers nor programming, but its also helping to fix that :p
Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
301–310 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#302"All of statistics" by Larry Wasserman. I took a bunch of courses that taught stats as a bunch of independent tools for different problems. AOS helped me to build some a strong foundation.
"Fundamental university physics Volume 1: Mechanics" by Alonso and Finn. This book seems to be not very well known in the USA, but it is very popular in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. It is your classical introductory physics/mechanics course with a very high emphasis on calculus.
"Computational partial differential equations" by Hans Peter Langtagen. A book on numerical methods for solutions of PDEs. It has the right amount of rigour (so you are able to tackle the literature), but it also includes code and plenty of practical advice.
"Nonlinear dynamics and chaos" by Strogatz. I think this book is really well known and I can't add much.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#303https://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html When this came out, it made all the difference in understanding things.
Ahh yes, the "unicode sandwich." A single phrase that solved ten-years of (my) wonder at why we were always doing .encode() and .decode() in Python. This after reading a dozen pieces on Unicode. Just add more until it works.
Completely understood Unicode itself on disk/on the wire, but couldn't write a proper program handling it, until then. No one until Ned (in my experience) bothered to mention it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#304I'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…
I wrote this one over the course of a few months that summarized everything I could think of on the topic - https://www.taniarascia.com/asynchronous-javascript-event-lo...
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#305It took learning another language (Japanese) for me to finally make sense of my native language (English)'s grammar.
I still remember the day I learned the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs in Japanese and had that "ooooHHHHHH" moment in my head where all verbs everywhere finally made sense.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#306For ruby in particular, Metaprogramming Ruby helped me understand the deeper semantics of the language in a way that has been very helpful over the years.
Came here to post the same. The book has a nice flow to it, or at least one which fit well with my personal thought processes. Named "patterns" (for lack of a better word) are introduced via examples that build upon each other, starting with simpler techniques and gradually becoming more complex.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#307https://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html When this came out, it made all the difference in understanding things.
Ahh yes, the "unicode sandwich." A single phrase that solved ten-years of (my) wonder at why we were always doing .encode() and .decode() in Python. This after reading a dozen pieces on Unicode. Just add more until it works. Completely understood Unicode itself on disk/on the wire, but couldn't write a proper program handling it, until then. No one until Ned (in my experience) bothered to mention it.
What helped me was using pycharm's debugger to examine the datatypes - it shows you whether something is a bytestream or a unicode string. Stepping through some functions really clarified the matter and squashed a lot of bugs.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#308I tried learning Borland Turbo C++ in the early 90's on my 286. I had the SAMS book "Learn Turbo C++ in 24 Hours". 15 year old me dutifully worked through it until I got to Pointers.
20 years later, a dev I worked with: "Oh, pointers are just a reference to a memory address".
GAH.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#309I watched a lot of Kevlin Henney videos on YouTube, and though I can't find the exact video... the point he made that when you add threading, you change the laws of physics of programming, really stuck with me. Causality goes out the window, and that's why you should refactor to immutability as much as possible.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#310It was IRC. First efnet, then briefly undernet, and then freenode. Seeing how problems are handled and solved by people light-years ahead of me, how questions are approached, the hacker culture where strict discipline is required for any inquiry taught me everything I needed to become a professional programmer.