alt Hacker NewsBeyond the slowing you to type, the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation. This is what had me spending money when I could get the reference manual for free - a guide, a book that taught me unfamiliar concepts in top down fashion, and took some degree of responsibility to be both accessible and comprehensive.
I love the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a guided book. I don't find such guided books in computer science much anymore sadly, but for now I still do it in other venues - French, Biology Astrophysics and such. I grab a book, and then use LLM to supplement my reading as my mind always has a myriad questions :).
Not entirely sure why computer science is so radically different - maybe because things change and get obsolete too fast? At any rate, cuddling with a book is still my favourite way to learn a new topic, much as I spend 12 hrs a day eagerly typing and staring at the screen as well :).
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"considred and mindful order of presentiation" -- along these lines my favorite programming book of all time is the Commodore 64 User's Guide, coupled with the reference. I was quite young and found the programming section very approachable. I felt like I had a companion to guide me through the process of learning and understanding. IIRC, I read it like a novel a couple-few times in the process.
> the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation
I'd always start with textbooks then flesh out the gaps with internet materials.
I felt "linear learning" from a veteran practitioner gave me a shortcut to how I should store the material and conceptualize the relationships between moving parts. Like surveying the land, putting foundations where an expert might put them, but then I was on my own for what knowledge to actually build.
I've commented on this development before on HN, so I'm glad to see this post on the front page. From a few months back:
"...the fact of the matter is that kids getting into high tech and programming mostly don't read books anymore. How do I know? Recently I was hanging out with a bunch of high school students who asked me how I learned. I said it was mostly via books and man pages. "Yeah, don't sleep on high quality written material. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. Manning. MIT. No Starch Press. &c...
"Well. You should have seen the look on their faces. I might as well have morphed into the Steve Buscemi meme "How do you do, fellow kids?" They looked at me like I was a total relic or greybeard and said things like "Nah, nobody reads tech books anymore; I learned Typescript from YouTube videos."
> the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation.
> a guide, a book that taught me unfamiliar concepts in top down fashion, and took some degree of responsibility to be both accessible and comprehensive
> the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a guided book
> I grab a book, and then use LLM to supplement my reading
My sentiments exactly!
People forget that mere data/information without a proper encompassing mental model/framework into which that information slots in to complete the big picture is what education and knowledge are all about. You must see the forest and not just the trees.
This is particularly relevant to CS since there are so many interlinked concepts involved that you can get overwhelmed and drown in the details without understanding anything. Edsger Dijkstra explicitly pointed this out in his EWD340: The Humble Programmer - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF
If you haven't built up a systematic and holistic mental model then you have not learnt anything. Top-down design and Bottom-up implementation both have to meet for the system to come together.
This is the main reason you need a good teacher or a good book as a stand-in for the teacher.
Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare.
Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe.
Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.