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Comment by mathgenius | Hacker News Reader

Books are too low bandwidth. You will get stuck, mostly on trivial stuff. Then what do you do?

My advice is to find a teacher. If they are any good they will speed up the process by one or two (or more) orders of magnitude. Even the professionals do this.

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>You will get stuck, mostly on trivial stuff. Then what do you do?

Find other books. There's a reason why university libraries have old editions of the same books and very similar books on the same topic.

This is great and, in my experience, non-trivial advice. I often used to get stuck on a mathematics textbook, and wouldn't know how to go forward. Turns out, sometimes different textbooks covering the same topic will be much better, or even just will be better for teaching one specific concept.

What works for me is to combine the two. I can absorb most things from books. Then, when I get stuck, I ask the advice of someone who knows. I was actually surprised how inexpensive this can be these days and how much a passionate teacher can give you these days in terms of inspiration and opening your mind to new perspectives regarding something you (thought you) already knew.

Yeah - I dug out my old caculus textbook a while ago and started trying to work all of the problems in it. But there are a handful I just can’t get, no matter how long I work on them. It would be nice to give in and ask somebody who knows the material better than I do where I’m going wrong (although I’m sure it will probably be something stupid...)

In my experience these problems get solved extremely quickly once you realize where the problem is, so I tend to collect a small list of these and then call one of these tutors offering lessons to university students.

Not everyone can afford thousands of dollars for tutoring. But forums and MOOCs are good.

Do you have any physics forums to recommend off the top of your head?

There are often interesting discussions under each video on Khan Academy, I know this one too https://www.physicsforums.com/, and this one in French https://zestedesavoir.com/forums/savoirs/sciences/

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