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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?

#381

Post by foooobaba »

spapas82 wrote: post #159

For me it was the book "Teach yourself C++ in 21 days" by Jesse Liberty. I know it has a funny title however this book allowed me to finally understand Object Oriented Programming.

Me too! This book has a special place in my heart since it’s the first time I actually understood programming. When I was 13 my goal for the summer was to learn to code. I was struggling hard to understand javascript after learning html, but it just made no sense to me. Then I randomly found this book, worked thru it in about a month, then c++ and even JS also made sense. All though did have like 8+ hr a day to devote to it since my “job” was to babysit my siblings lol.

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

#382

Post by paragraft »

amykhar wrote: post #120

When I took Trigonometry in high school, it was all about memorizing a bunch of stuff and I did horribly. When I took it in college, the professor taught us how to derive everything based on the Unit Circle. It just clicked. I ended up doing so well in that class that the professor got me to change my major to mathematics and got me a scholarship too.

I ctrl-f'ed for this one. First exposure was SOHCAHTOA and memorization without building intuition. I struggled and had no real understanding. Two years later a physics teacher draws a unit circle with sine and cosine marked out as an incidental explanation for something else, and 2 years of frustration suddenly clicked. Gave me huge appreciation for the power of a good explanation.

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

#383

Post by foooobaba »

dendrite9 wrote: post #356
foooobaba wrote: post #247

3blue1brown linear algebra + the linear algebra chapter from “all the math you missed but need to know for graduate school” - linear algebra and abstract vector spaces in general finally feel familiar. Also, timbuktu manuscripts - showed a history that I had never really heard of. These are written manuscripts of african scholars which are hundreds of years old, and still exist today. Some record the history of great…

On the Timbuktu manuscripts, I found this book really fascinating. I knew about bits of the story on a very rough sense but the details about various people, and excerpts from the manuscripts made for a book I had to finish. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Bad-Ass-Librarian... Syria’s Secret Library By Mike Thomson was suggested to me while I was reading the previous book, but I haven't made time to read i…

Thanks for sharing, I’ll have to check these out.

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

#384

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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)?

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

#385

Post by mandeepj »

thoughtpalette wrote: post #186
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…

Commenting for later. Wish you could "favorite" comments.

> Commenting for later. Wish you could "favorite" comments.

Or, you can upvote it (comment)

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

#388

Post by Lonestar1440 »

I never quite understood what all the Registers and Interrupts and Instructions inside the computer did until I read Code (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44882.Code). I feel like I finished the book with a very good understanding of what's actually happening under the hood of a computer system.

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

#389

Post by waboremo »

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)?

No because the React team changes their approach every other year anyways.

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

#390

Post by mixmastamyk »

rsj_hn wrote: post #307
mixmastamyk wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes, the "unicode sandwich." A single phrase that solved ten-years of (my) wonder at why we were always doing .encode() and .decode() in Python. This after reading a dozen pieces on Unicode. Just add more until it works. Completely understood Unicode itself on disk/on the wire, but couldn't write a proper program handling it, until then. No one until Ned (in my experience) bothered to mention it.

What helped me was using pycharm's debugger to examine the datatypes - it shows you whether something is a bytestream or a unicode string. Stepping through some functions really clarified the matter and squashed a lot of bugs.

Oh, I knew the types all right. Could even fix errors. Didn't know what to do with them, as in what-goes-where and when and most importantly why. The unicode sandwich solved all that. ;-)
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