I am asking not only about learning what is taught in classes for solving ideal problems. I am talking about the real engineering like a hobbyist who actually understands what works in real life and how to build it properly.
Is there anyone on HN, who have never learned programming or CS by taking formal classes, but learned everything by reading books on their own and building stuff that they wanted?What was the process like? Maybe they were from different major like engineering, physics, maths, biology, social sciences, humanities?
Which is the best resource (book, public course, blogs, etc) to get started in machine and deep learning and then get good at it both as a practitioner and from theoretical understanding?The ultimate goal is to become a good at implementing models and come up with new ones.Is there something like teachyourselfCS but for Data Science, ML and DL?
People say that learning mathematics changes your brain. You start to think in new ways. You gain superpower in solving all kinds of problems.How and when did you realise this power that comes with learning mathematics? What is you favorite math topic?
While self studying mathematics have you worked through any book that made a fundamental shift in your mind about how you viewed math in general and learn new math topics?Can you write a few lines about those books?
Why do functional programmers hate looping constructs of imperative languages and ignore them as if they don't exist?
I want to learn web programming. Mostly because I will have the full stack to express myself starting from the UI to the functionality (backend).But, I don't want to start with frameworks. I want to learn vanilla HTML, CS, JS. Frameworks hide many things. I know the DOM is a structured form of data. I want full control through vanilla JS to manipulate and bend that structure at my will.Where...
Assuming that you are still learning and you learn from new experiences or concepts, what was the most mind blowing concept you learnt that totally changed how you approached programming problems?
Sometimes people come around books, after reading which, they get a new found love for that subject and start pursuing it more in a deeper way.What is your favorite subject that you started loving because of a few books that you read?
UC Berkeley has a three course sequence for anyone wanting to be a CS major. The course are:1. CS61A: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/archives.html)2. CS61B: Data Structures (https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61b/archives.html)3. CS61C: Machine Structures (https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/archives.html)You can view the lectures...
These courses [0] [1] are on EdX and are taught by UBC Professor Gregor Kiczales. The explanations are so lucid it made recursion click for me. You can audit these courses without paying a single dime. They are based on the book How to Design Programs [2] which has much more stuff than the courses.This book is used in UBC, UWaterloo, NorthEastern and many other places.
Along the same lines there is another book for beginners called A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing [3]. It is used in Brown for their introductory courses.
[0] https://www.edx.org/course/how-to-code-simple-data
We all know the despise of math amongst the general school going population. There may be several reasons for that. Paul Lockhart has an entire essay on that called The Mathematician's Lament. There may be several others I haven't read.I am from India. In the last two years of high school in our time we had to choose a specialisation of either science, commerce or arts (humanities). While there...
HNers who are doing PhD,1. What is your topic of research?2. Is it different from your undergrad and/or masters field of study?3. How do you spend a typical day?4. What is the most useful skill that you have learnt or regularly use in your life as a researcher?
In general CS departments make students take multiple programming fundamental courses once in imperative and popular (read Python) , then OOP (read Java), then again a systems low level one (read C).Instead teach them programming fundamentals in a good way by teaching proper use of functions and state. e.g.: the How to Design Programs philosophy or SICP philosophy without the math...
How to Code: Complex Data [1]
These two part course rearranged my brain about what really programming is about. It is about working with data and the way the data is arranged determines how most of the program/functionality (pun intended) is written.
Programming is not a series of instructions to be executed by the computer. That was when assembly language programming was the main stay of programming computers. Not now.
For someone out of touch in mathematics and done undergrad in electrical engineering and currently working as a programmer I want to relearn/learn mathematica again. I have done calculus in the past and some matrix algebra and probability in college. But I remember those topics very foggily.I want to learn undergrad math properly again. Books or courses are my friend in this journey.I ask you...