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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?

#441

Post by astrange »

yamtaddle wrote: post #124
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #14

I had a very poor model of what people meant when they spoke of divinity, god, and religion until reading the Tao Te Ching. Whenever I heard god, I just thought of sky daddy. The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation.

> The key is to understand that religion is a map, not the territory. All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination, mixed with varying levels of human interpretation. Given that a large fraction of people who self-identify as religious would vigorously disagree with this, I think this insight's of limited—though perhaps not no —utility in understanding religion.

This idea is called "perennialism" and is one of the inspirations for German Idealism/New Age/hippies. It's also of course not true.

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

#442

Post by beyonddream »

gglitch wrote: post #31

For me, it was Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation that finally made recursion click. He gives a fantastic, simple, high-level breakdown of different recursion models with simple, non-mathematical examples. The student was ready and the master appeared.

I miss this book. Beautifully written esp. the chapter on recursion - it introduced many new types of recursion schemes than I was aware of at that time. The only book where I did almost all the exercises!

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

#443

Post by sifar »

mrkeen wrote: post #275
sifar wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Also all the other works (philosphy/religion) have elaborate contraptions to describe what it/God/ is. TTC is the only one that starts out with it cannot be told. No go live it.

"But the true Tao cannot be lived, and if you live the Tao, it is not the true tao." I posit that my made-up nonsense rebuttal has as much merit as anything else in this thread.

Its a pity that you feel it is some made-up nonsense and doesn't reflect the world in some way. Helps us give a different perspective on how or what things are. But that is alright, different things appeal to different people.

It doesn't matter one bit to the things/ideas whether we believe in them or not. It matters to us what we believe in.

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

#444

Post by curious16 »

2143 wrote: post #151

For me, even though I had a superficial understanding of git, it was finally after going through the first few chapters of the Pro Git book that things finally clicked, and I literally sat there wondering how I managed to code anything at all without using git for years. > For programming it was How to Design Programs at www.htdp.org I already have over 4 years of professional software engineering experience (mostly…

If you have extensive experience in programming you may try out SICP if you find HtDP too slow.

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

#446

Post by dudeinjapan »

jstogin wrote: post #38
dudeinjapan wrote: post #2

"Div, Grad, Curl, And All That: An Informal Text On Vector Calculus" This was "optional" reading in my Undergrad Calculus class at Brown, I probably was the only student who bothered to read it, and it made most of engineering a breeze for the next 3.5 years, whether electromagnetism, fluid dynamics, etc.

I came here to see if this book made the list. I read it the summer before taking AP Physics. It made that class a breeze. Still, I'm impressed it made this list given it's not a CS book.

I'm surprised so many other people had the same experience I did! Cool!

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

#447

Post by tunesmith »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #384
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…

Anything for React (modern versions)?

The beta docs are really good. I just keep re-reading them, particularly "You might not need an effect", and I still keep finding nuggets that surprise me.

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

#448

Post by bad_username »

2143 wrote: post #151

For me, even though I had a superficial understanding of git, it was finally after going through the first few chapters of the Pro Git book that things finally clicked, and I literally sat there wondering how I managed to code anything at all without using git for years. > For programming it was How to Design Programs at www.htdp.org I already have over 4 years of professional software engineering experience (mostly…

It is very hard to make sense of git's interface and commands unless you have an idea how it works under the hood. The book explains it excellently.

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

#449

Post by dudeinjapan »

keepquestioning wrote: post #216
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).

I started to read this book but it seems to be full of political bile. How does it compare to Economics in One Lesson?

It's "political" because when you start to actually understand how various incentives motivate human economic behavior, "if you subsidize more of A you get more of B", it shines an uncomfortable light on the consequences on many policy choices.

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

#450

Post by tsingy »

connectsnk wrote: post #183
blahblah1234567 wrote: post #129

Statistics. It made data, functions, web applications, and REST API finally click for me. I took two stats courses-- a simple one at a community college where we dabbled with a stats analysis app. And a more complex one, where we wrote scripts in the language "R" and uses rStudio. I began to realize things I should have realized long before that: - Functions typically intake data, and output data. What made it click…

Which book can you recommend for learning stats

This (https://www.openintro.org/book/os/) is the best imo. Follow with Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath and you're golden.
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