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.
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?
#32For 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.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#33Had a really hard time understanding 3d graphics programming until I watched Chili’s 3D fundamentals course on youtube: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqCJpWy5Fohe8ucwhksiv9h...
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#34I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life). Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done( https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ... ). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that mos…
What do you use for your getting things done workflow? I just started using neovim and found the neorg (https://github.com/nvim-neorg/neorg) package which has a GTD module.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#35It’s probably not in the spirit of your question and is admittedly a bit tangential but during the five years I seriously studied maths, I realised that sometimes something which seemed obscure or that I poorly understood during a course years ago would suddenly fall into place all at once semi-randomly while coming back to it for a more advanced or an adjacent subject.
I think that sometimes you just need time to properly digest a subject. The pieces are there unbeknown to you but you are somehow saturated and unable to properly connect them.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#36The thing that really made Haskell click for me was learning OCaml. I was getting confused about little things such as whether a particular token was a type or a value, particularly with some of the more advanced extensions enabled. Learning OCaml gave me a secondary perspective on the ML family, and now I can comfortably navigate Haskell code more or less.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#37Capital, Vol. I
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#38"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.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#39Gilbert Strang's lectures on Linear Algebra: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010...
LinAlg was the only maths course I needed in my interdisciplinary study program. I had struggled to grasp maths in high school, but these lectures really made it click for me and I passed my university's class with a B+.
Re: Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?
#40I do get that "click" praise for "Understanding SEO - A systematic approach to Search Engine Optimization"
It's now ~5 years old and people still recommend it. So I prop. did something right. Like leaving out all the things about SEO that change over time.
Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-SEO-Systematic-Approach...
Free for hackernews on gumroad https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773941
Print https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/understanding-seo