The New Way Things Work, not a textbook per se. It's an encyclopaedia. But it taught so many things.
Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
121–130 of 171 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#122- The Shape of Space by Jeffrey R. Weeks -- from geometry to cosmology, exercises your mind into visualizing the shape of the universe. - Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C. H. Papadimitriou, and U. V. Vazirani. -- compact book that goes from the basics to divide-and-conquer, graphs, dynamic programming, linear programming, NP-completeness, and Quantum.
+1 for DPV. It is on another league when it comes to algo textbooks.
It is so compact, crisp, and enjoyable to read despite containing a lot of Math.
I was surprised when I was reading this book, it was so great to read.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#123Ask HN: What book changed your life?
393 points|tomrod|1 year ago|522 comments
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#124- The Shape of Space by Jeffrey R. Weeks -- from geometry to cosmology, exercises your mind into visualizing the shape of the universe. - Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C. H. Papadimitriou, and U. V. Vazirani. -- compact book that goes from the basics to divide-and-conquer, graphs, dynamic programming, linear programming, NP-completeness, and Quantum.
+1 for DPV. It is on another league when it comes to algo textbooks. It is so compact, crisp, and enjoyable to read despite containing a lot of Math. I was surprised when I was reading this book, it was so great to read.
The build up to explain the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and the role of the roots of unity is clear and fascinating, the elegance of that algorithm have stayed with me.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just don’t understand (seriously).
No, I fully understand when it is appropriate to offer solutions vs empathy. Re-read what I wrote and take a serious attempt at engaging.
No offense, but if you do understand all that, the answer to your question is obvious and you’re perfectly capable of figuring it out yourself. Whether or not those labels is warranted is another thing, but you can definitely do the legwork on your own. I’d be more interested in engaging with you if your own responses to me and my sibling comments were less, well, confrontational.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL, Genesis had enough bullshit in it that I was questioning things immediately. Somewhere in there it says that the stars were created after earth. And then there's Noah and the flood with the completely impossible repopulating the earth with a single family and a single pair of each animal. Exactly how did 2 buffalo's get to the middle east? Of course, the answer would be that god magicked them there - but then I…
FWIW, the modern Catholic church's official stance is that Genesis should not be taken literally, and Catholics make up about half of the world's Christians. I think biblical literalism is mostly an American Evangelical thing.
Even better, well, take everything literally except for the parts that are provably wrong. If one part is not true, then any or all parts may not be true. And since there's almost no evidence for anything miraculous in the Bible then AFAIK it's all untrue until proven otherwise. I should mention I was a deacon when I was in my 20s, so it's not like I was raised atheist.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#127If a textbook is eye-opening, that's partly due to the textbook but it's also because you were at a moment in your understanding of that subject, that your eyes were ready to be opened and just needed a trigger. For me, TAOCP in high school was a big one. I don't claim to have understood very much of it, but spending evenings in the library bashing through the parts I could make sense of gave a total change in perspective.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#128The Blind Spot: Lectures On Logic by Jean Yves-Girard For context, Girard is a mathematical logician, philosopher, and co-discoverer of the type system System F (Haskell, ML, etc.). The book is a monograph on proof theory, and I was interested in learning more about affine and linear logic to deepen my understanding of Rust and other language ecosystems focused around the ability to explicitly model resources. Howeve…
I did a double take when I saw "continental philosophy." Usually I don't expect that to be mixed with math, since it's roots are more in the humanities.
How are exactly does continental philosophy factor into these other topics?
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#129Not a textbook but when I actually read the Bible I realized it was total nonsense and left religion.
Try reading the Bible again after watching Jordan Peterson's the Biblical series. You'll thank me later.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most eye-opening textbooks you have ever read?
#130The Blind Spot: Lectures On Logic by Jean Yves-Girard For context, Girard is a mathematical logician, philosopher, and co-discoverer of the type system System F (Haskell, ML, etc.). The book is a monograph on proof theory, and I was interested in learning more about affine and linear logic to deepen my understanding of Rust and other language ecosystems focused around the ability to explicitly model resources. Howeve…
I did a double take when I saw "continental philosophy." Usually I don't expect that to be mixed with math, since it's roots are more in the humanities. How are exactly does continental philosophy factor into these other topics?
Jean Yves-Girard's thinking evolved from analytic philosophy to continental philosophy over the course of his life, and in this book in particular, some of his asides and polemics critique how we conceptualize truth, knowledge, and logic, and how other fields conceptualize that stuff, from a continental perspective. The fact that this kind of stuff turned up in a mathematical logic book of all places really struck me. It put me on a path to taking a more serious interest in the continental school, and reading more of it (currently chewing on Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour). It's a very unusual and difficult book, that led me to very different (compared to what I am used to, anyway) modes of thinking.