bpesquet

I also think that asking the right questions to a model while following a lecture, assessing its answers and integrating them into one's own reasoning is difficult. There is certainly a minimum age/experience level under which this process will generally fail, possibly hindering the learning outcome.

Nevertheless, I saw with my own eyes a mid-level student significantly improving his understanding of a difficult topic because he had access to a LLM in real time. I believe this is a breakthrough. Time will tell.

They struggled for a while, and the first student who gave the right answer explained how he did it. All morning, he interacted with ChatGPT while following my course, asking questions each time my own explanations weren't sufficient for him to understand. He managed to give the LLM enough context and information for it to spit not only the right answer, but also the whole underlying process to obtain it. In French, qui plus est ;)

This was for me an eye-opening, but also a bit unsettling experience. I don't use ChatGPT & co much for now, so this might seems pretty mundane to some of you. Anyway, I realized that during any lecture or lab, teachers will soon face (or are already facing) augmented students able to check and consolidate their understanding in real time. This is great news for education as a whole, but it certainly interrogates our current teaching model.

Admittedly, it is a rather pricey model (Omega Speedmaster). I bought it second hand for 1500 € a few years ago. Unfortunately, prices have since skyrocketed for many emblematic watches like this one.

My watch takes 15 seconds to rewind each day, and 5 seconds to be time adjusted by one minute twice a week. Service is every 5 years, the last one cost me 88 €. It gets more valuable each year, and I plan to bequeath it to my son in a (hopefully) very distant future.

To each his own, I guess.

Any smartwatch will become unusable, polluting garbage a few years (months?) from now: a canonical example of planned obsolescence. Their self-tracking functions are a double-edged sword, a source of stress as much as relief.

Any well-built and well-maintained mechanical watch will last you decades. No dependencies on electricity and network connectivity, it's a self-contained and entirely autonomous piece of human engineering. Mine was built in 1975 and is one year older than me. In a world where everything fades away so fast, wearing it everyday feels like owning a precious relic.

Easy choice if you ask me.

More beginner-focused alternatives are https://www.freecodecamp.org and https://thejsway.net.

Disclaimer: I've been teaching programming professionally for 15+ years and wrote the latter.

For all its qualities, Eloquent JS is not a very beginner-friendly book. For a smoother learning curve, you might consider https://github.com/thejsway/thejsway.

Disclaimer: I wrote this book.

On the same topic, see also:

- Andrej Karpathy's elegant micrograd library: https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd

- This tiny neural networks API inspired by it: https://github.com/bpesquet/pyfit

IMHO, Eloquent JavaScript is a great book but not really beginner-friendly. It's a solid choice if you are already proficient with another language.

https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/154357/1/paper.pdf (2013)

https://amueller.github.io/papers/wo_the_machine_varoquaux.p... (2015)

Nine months later, the book earned a little more than $3,000 in Leanpub royalties. Like other said, marketing is definitely the hardest part, especially if (like me) you had no initial audience. Since the book is free to read on GitHub, I hoped word-of-mouth would be enough to make it widely known and popular. Boy was I wrong.

The experience was worth it for a number of reasons, honing one's skills being the number one. That said, would-be authors without an existing follower base should prepare themselves for a multi-year commitment in order to reap any significant rewards.

I see TensorFlow as the Angular of machine learning: first on the market, powerful but unwiedly. Like Angular, it will ultimately get superseded by tools with a nicer API (scikit-learn, Keras) or more versatility (PyTorch). Like Angular, it's probably not the best choice for a beginner to invest time into.

Unfortunately, text is not a good medium to describe actions. A text-based environment setup tutorial ("double-click on this icon", "create this file in that folder", and so on) is tedious and ultimately inefficient. A screencast is certainly a better solution there. I might create one later.

Coding online with tools like CodePen and Glitch is another quicker and simpler solution for a complete beginner. This option is described in the book appendix.

You can support my work by buying the ebook version on Leanpub: https://leanpub.com/thejsway.

Monetization is not my #1 priority right now, but that might change later ;)

I'm currently writing a blog post about this experience. Expect it soon on https://medium.com/@bpesquet.

I need to figure out how this could be organized and will get back to you in a few days.

Backstory: I'm a CS engineer/teacher and this book is a side project started in December 2016. You can read a bit more about it here: https://medium.com/@bpesquet/walk-this-javascript-way-e9c45a....

The writing process is now completed and I'm actively looking for feedback to make the book better. Any opinion or advice about content, pricing, or that hastily created Leanpub cover would be greatly appreciated. However, please keep in mind that this is a self-published effort still far from being polished and open to improvement.

I'd also like this thread to stay focused on the book itself, not on the merits/weaknesses of JavaScript or the usefulness of choosing it as a first programming language.

Thanks in advance!

How would you teach OOP basics to a JS newcomer then? Using only class without mentioning prototypes?

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/what-programming-language-sh...

http://prog21.dadgum.com/203.html

To each his own, I guess :)

Understanding prototypal inheritance seems essential to me, and Object.create() is the cleanest way to show it in action.

The book also presents the alternative class syntax and numerous ES2015 additions like block-scoped variables and arrow functions, to name a few.