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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?

#371

Post by theonemind »

The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist on the differences between the brain hemispheres.

It's really an under-appreciated 800 lb gorilla hiding in the middle of the room of neuroscience that the two hemispheres are massively internally connected, but the corpus callosum does more to divide the hemispheres than to bridge them, in an organ for making connections, a fact large enough to beg for an explanation. Each can sustain consciousness on its own. They construct two different worlds, and you can find echos of the two worlds throughout all of human endeavor.

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

#373

Post by quickthrower2 »

This one for React: https://scrimba.com/learn/learnreact. Partly because it is great. Partly because it was the first time I sat down and did any course in React, rather than hacking stuff together!

What makes it great? You are given a development environment in the browser. You pause the lecture to play with the code shown by the speaker in real time. He encourages a lot of deliberate practice.

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

#374

Post by kylestlb »

datavirtue wrote: post #340
olalonde wrote: post #139

"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Helped me gain a more intuitive understanding of economics. On a side note, the man is a machine. He's been writing close to a book a year since the age of 80 (he's 92 now).

While slogging through an economics course in college I was frustrated that there were not teaching me anything. Then I discovered Sowell and Friedman and started watching every video I could find. Such a relief. I just did what they wanted me to do for the rest of the economics courses but basically just ignored it all. No one in academia or the media wants to hear what Sowell and Friedman have to say. I should have…

I majored in econ. Friedman is as mainstream as it gets. Not sure why your econ courses ignored the guy. He made quite a few appearances in my 200 and 300 level courses.

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

#375

Post by analog31 »

Art of Electronics, Horowitz and Hill. As a teenager, I had messed around with guitar amplifiers and effects pedals, and had made some gadgets by copying circuits from magazines. AoE (plus the professor who taught from it of course) made my understanding of transistors and op amps click. The treatment of electronic noise remains useful to me today, nearly 40 years later.

Transistor Transistor Logic followed by Z-80 Microcomputer Handbook, both published by Howard Sams and if I recall correctly, sold at Radio Shack. These books were clear enough that a teenager could grasp the concepts. Learning a relatively simple processor was a valuable foundation for learning microcontrollers and digital interfacing.

Turbo Pascal Manual, for versions 1 through 5. Those manuals were so clear and complete. They are probably the last manuals that I ever read cover to cover. That was kind of at the point where systems got too complex for any mere mortal to learn one completely.

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

#376

Post by adenozine »

After the 2008 crash I was at a very low point in my personal life and I was even considering moving away from DC and maybe going away from gov sector work and contract work and trying to find a "regular" job, etc etc.

I read this book called The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, and it opened my eyes about probability. I decided to get my MSc in Statistics and I reworked basically my whole midgame-endgame strategy for my life.

I look back so thankful for that book and for being in a position to just be at home during that time to read and ponder things. In particular, I remember some walks I went on with my wife and some conversations that I had anticipated being difficult about leaving or staying in DC, but it just all came together.

Recovering from the crash took time, but the purpose I found in pushing myself to get the degree done and to fight for my space here in govland was absolutely, positively instrumental.

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

#377

Post by tmh88j »

mayankkaizen wrote: post #264
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…

I wish someone can suggest me similar links for Python. Asynchronous programming has always been elusive to me.

Effective Python has a great chapter that goes over concurrency and parallelism using threads, coroutines and subprocesses. There are a lot of non-trivial code examples that the author gradually shows how to improve with more advanced language features over the course of several chapters so it's not all thrown at you at once, enabling you see benefits and pitfalls of approaching problems with different techniques. I highly suggest it even beyond learning async features.

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

#378

Post by atlacatl_sv »

analog31 wrote: post #375

Art of Electronics , Horowitz and Hill. As a teenager, I had messed around with guitar amplifiers and effects pedals, and had made some gadgets by copying circuits from magazines. AoE (plus the professor who taught from it of course) made my understanding of transistors and op amps click. The treatment of electronic noise remains useful to me today, nearly 40 years later. Transistor Transistor Logic followed by Z-80…

I've bought the art of electronics and I'm not sure why it's referenced so often. It certainly is not for beginners. I graduated in Electrical Engineering but still didn't find it useful yet.

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

#379

Post by CobrastanJorji »

I found "The Book of Shaders" to be an absolutely amazing resource for learning about what shaders do from a very basic level. Bonus: it's completely interactive and free online: https://thebookofshaders.com/

Unfortunately, they never finished it.

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

#380

Post by bluejay2387 »

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation

ISBN-13: 978-0691152707, ISBN-10: 0691152705

I've worked in optimization for over a decade but this book gave me an intuitive sense of many concepts that I had only been applying mechanically before.

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