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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?

#131

Post by mjburgess »

gwbas1c wrote: post #119

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It (Michael E. Gerber) What it taught me is that effective organizations invest heavily in training newcomers how to do their jobs / processes. I see this everywhere; when I walk into a business and something's "just off," it's almost always because management is dropping the ball on training newcomers how to do their jobs. In my specific…

100% agree with this... it's very strange. The younger the business I've worked at, the more they assume incoming talent has the skills. And its exactly the opposite.

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

#132

Post by is_true »

gwbas1c wrote: post #119

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It (Michael E. Gerber) What it taught me is that effective organizations invest heavily in training newcomers how to do their jobs / processes. I see this everywhere; when I walk into a business and something's "just off," it's almost always because management is dropping the ball on training newcomers how to do their jobs. In my specific…

I think the problem is that most people managing organizations don't see the value in processes.

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

#133

Post by 2b3a51 »

Elements of Classical Thermodynamics A. B. Pippard, CUP. [1]

Made things like adiabatic processes, entropy and the Carnot cycle much more comprehensible as part of a general formalism. The 'classical' in the title means not statistical so we are talking heat engines and such.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/physics/gener...

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

#134

Post by Yhippa »

I took a graduate-level cryptography class years ago. The material was advanced for me, so I had to do serious catch-up on the maths that underlie the basics. The main concepts too, to be honest. I looked at many resources online but the Khan Academy course in Cryptography by far was the most helpful: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/crypt...

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

#136

Post by tinco »

Weird one, "How to talk to anyone" by Leil Lowndes, bought because someone else recommended, no idea about the scientific merit of anything in it. It helped me not just make sense of how to navigate social situations, but also how to view them as a game that can be played strategically if you need a particular outcome.

The books "Superforecasting" and "Think again" helped me nail down when and why people (myself included) make mistakes and I think it helped me prevent making mistakes or recognize mistakes others are about to make better.

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

#137

Post by busterarm »

Kind of a weak contribution to the overall thread but...

Early in my career Rails really felt a little too magical. It did what I wanted but I didn't understand it at the fundamentals.

Then I broke down how ActiveRecord worked. I listed all of its functions and capabilities and wrote my own version of ActiveRecord to do the same things. Immediately the whole thing clicked.

Nowadays I would probably be able to get away with reading the code, but back then it was tremendously helpful.

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

#138

Post by crazygringo »

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.

> All religions are essentially different paths to the same destination

Just to be clear, many religions and religious viewpoints would vehemently disagree with you.

The idea that all religions lead to the same place is really just one variety of religious belief. There are many others.

Reading the Tao Te Ching is great, but I'm not sure it's going to give you much insight into what Roman Catholics or Sunni Muslims are speaking of when they talk about divinity, god, and religion.

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

#140

Post by stagger87 »

How much of a topic clicking is just reading from several different sources, rather than one source being particularly "good"? I often joke with a coworker that we don't fully understand a topic until we have read several textbooks/papers on it. It doesn't really matter how good any one text is. I've always wondered what the mechanism is for this. Is is just a certain amount of exposure to a topic? Or is there truly something different enough about the way different authors present material that once you have read from a few, things connect differently?

That being said, how many people are citing specific sources, when it was really just additional exposure to a topic that helped something "click"?

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