marai2

I'll second the recommendation above. For folks coming to algorithms for the first time I would recommend _Grokking Algorithms An illustrated guide for programmers and other curious people_ as a nice quick _tour_ of the field. And the _Common Sense Guide_ (mentioned above) as the next book. For complete beginners this book has the best simple explanations of algorithms I've read in any book (and I have a whole bunch of them).

Thank you!! Just yesterday I was googling trying to find a good introduction to learning assembly and today here it is!!!

As the footer on the online version of the book says "Handcrafted by Robert Nystorm" - it really is lovingly hand crafted. It shows that the author went over the content many, many times polishing it with every go. The content builds up really well as it goes along.

On a minor note, whenever I read a technical book I always come across some mistake in the copy-editing, a missed article, a misplaced article, a typo. I'm 70% of the way in and haven't come across any! Which again speaks to the well-craftedness and hand-craftedness of the book!

Though I do feel the author ran out of steam with respect to the lovely, quirky artwork in the book. I'm disappointed Bob, I want my money back.

I think the difference is that this book in about 200 pages or so, starts from two boys using flashlights to attempt to "communicate" with each and goes through simple circuits to logic gates to CPU, ALU, volatile memory, rudiments of assembly language to a high level language. That's the difference, hand holding you through the explanations with the emphasis on pedagogy rather than being a dry theory book.

Weighs 52000 lbs (26 tons)! But because of the surface area of the track puts down only 5 lbs of pressure (per square inch, I think).

This is one of the best science documentaries I have seen. I'm surprised I missed it - it was made in 2011, and it had a surprising amount of visual history that I was not aware of. From the rivalry between Volta and Galvani, to all the trial and error experiments of the 19th century.

I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in the history of electricity or people interested in Physics in general.

Since we regularly get comments on HN about people wanting to study math in some capacity and about the challenges in doing so - I thought this was a really quote from this video:

Jinyoung (after having been a secondary school Math teacher for 7 years):

"... there was a big obstacle in studying mathematics or pursuing my career in mathematics, which was me, myself. Because I just couldn't stop thinking that oh I'm too old and I started too late or I didn't learn enough amount of mathematics in college ..."

and now here she is with some world class work to her name.

Wow, thanks for posting this. I would never have come across this. It's good to get some background info to the editer-in-cheif's thinking on when and why we might get a print version of the magazine.

@kaveh808 - since you mentioned spending a lot of time on the Common Lisp tutorial for your friend - it would be awesome if you'd repurpose it as a general tutorial for people new to or interested in Common Lisp, maybe as YouTube videos?!

You can also do an HN search for it. Here is one excerpt from an HN comment: "... So for example, a book like "Lisp in Small Pieces", which taught me the concept of Continuations, was considerably hard on the conceptual side. This also took at least a month of conscious connecting the dots between what was in the text, tail-recursion, and those funny callback functions I've been writing in nodejs, before i "Got it".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2418459

This is a question for the folks who have been reading the Economist regularly for a while. What do you guys feel like you get out of reading the Economist over time? This is meant as a genuine question. So for example, I consume my news only via my Google News feed, so basically just a fast scan of the headlines and maybe a few news articles in depth. Does the Economist provide more details, more nuance, more depth? Do you guys feel it helps paint the bigger picture better then "regular" news media, a more erudite perspective?

I totally agree. If you're into computers and computer-sciency interests and interpreters/compilers, try going through the Dragon book and try going through Bob's book. You'll realize that even though the Dragon book sells for something like $160, the Crafting Interpreters book is worth many times over for its pedagogy. (Of course both books have very different aims so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, one is a good book for an overall Compilers course and the other gets you right in to writing your own interpreter with just enough theory to see how things fit together).

The book has two interpreters. The first one is in Java. The second one uses C. If you're familiar with Java then it makes for a great learning experience to contrast the Java version with the C version. (I think it's worth it to learn just enough C to be able to go through this second version. It makes for an awesome learning experience!)

Trigonometry The Easy Way, was brilliant! I wouldn't categorize it as forced in the manner of the OP. The book creates a fantasy backdrop to connect trigonometrical concepts in a fun way. I really enjoyed the book and it made trigonometry really stick in my brain!

This guy is a (inter-)national treasure!

Would you mind shedding some light on how you do development and the pros and cons you experienced comparing to REPL-driven development?

Walter, it would be great if you could share your list of good books!

And j = json.loads

For quick debugging:

print( j( some_data_structure ))

For some data structure that you'll eventually be sending out as json.

I'm sorry but this is the funniest comment I've read on HN!

The State Monad a Tutorial for the Confused:

http://brandon.si/code/the-state-monad-a-tutorial-for-the-co...

And I did!

A few days ago I was trying to understand the State Monad in Haskell because the book I was reading didn't explain it well. So I Googled it and the the first couple of links also didn't satisfy, including the Haskell wiki book that many articles link to. However further down the search results list I found an blog post that seamed like somebody had written directly to what was confusing me. The author had obviously put a bunch of effort into making a clear and understandable exposition. I was so impressed by the article that I had to write to the author letting them know how much I appreciated the effort they had put into the article. But when I looked at the blog post date it was from 2012!! Which in internet time seems like ages ago!

My point with this long winded reply is that I think the primary motivation should be to help people. Obviously if you're spending a whole lot of effort to make an explainer for the contest and Grant changes the format next year then there is little utility to that effort. But for these contestants and their submissions I plan to bookmark this page and this will be my daily breakfast viewing for many days to come! (I was so excited to see such a long list of submissions for my consumption!) I think the effort people put into their submissions over time will be significantly greater (if not absolutely greater) than what 1:1 tutoring might achieve.

Nice! It's 23 hours and 54 minutes long! 15 minutes a day listen and I'll be done in 100 days!

That was a great MOOC by Dan Grossman - discussed a number of times here on HN.

The famous quote from Alan J Perlis:

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

I think that's just the nature of the ... problem domain. There are too many little details that are too similar and our brains have gotten used to Googling. Early on I started creating text files for all these little details for all the languages I know. And now a quick search for these details is an extension of how my brain works. In other words I realized I needed to deposit these chunks of information where I know I'll need to reference them in the future. Is it "else if", "elif", "elsif" in Python, Perl, Ruby - grep or quick search my ruby.txt, ocaml.txt, etc. file. And since I live in emacs, this takes just a few characters to accomplish.

Kinda similar to https://learnxinyminutes.com/

This was a great read! To quote a commenter @Endaldo on Twitter:

"This thread is the Great American Novel, only on Twitter, and mostly set in London. Extraordinary."

The first 30 seconds are slow but after that crossing the intersection gives me a new appreciation for the human brain :-)

Why Bob why! I kid you not, just 2 days ago I typed your name in the Amazon search box to see if this book would show up even if for pre-orders, but it didn't show. I had some $work money to spend on educational resources and I wanted to buy this book! I ended up buying other books.

But seriously congratulations! I'll happily spend my own money to support all the effort you put into this!

Does anyone have recommendations for tutorials/books/courses that go beyond explaining the basics of CSS to how to actually design stuff with CSS. I've gone through numerous this is how Flex and Grid work, this is list of all the options for Flex and Grid, this is why we used tables in the old days and Float had it's problems. I'd like to learn how to use the building blocks of CSS as they are now and ... you know be able to learn how to make nice looking designs.

I realize to actually get good at design requires elbow grease and practice, but it still would be nice to have a good teacher/guide to show you how things are done now.

You could start a business doing ELI5s of complex topics! Thank you for a wonderful summary!

I know HN frowns upon such meta comments, but thank you for this comment! Wonderfully clear exposition - I followed along completely with your comment and now have some level of understanding of harmonics and brass instruments where I had none before. This was a good day, I learned something today that I have long been curious about!