7 ms·

I often here comments about finishing a mathematical/technical book over the course of a "few" weekends. But I don't see how thats possible if it includes comp

I often here comments about finishing a mathematical/technical book over the course of a "few" weekends. But I don't see how thats possible if it includes completing all (or even most of) the given exercises. Especially when you have a full-time job.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
asimuvPR 10y ago
Some people are able to do it. But most are exaggerating or not doing the exercises. It takes me weeks to properly finish a good technical book due to time constraints. Either way, just do your best and forget about anybody else.
lamby 10y ago
Mmm. Besides, I find my programming/work/etc. improves when I read novels in my spare time :)
- happy-go-lucky 10y ago
  On the contrary, I find my work/family life improves when I do nothing in my spare time ヅ
peruvian 10y ago
Over the weekend? I can't do it. Even if I forced myself to read for 6 hours Saturday and Sunday I'd forget everything during the weekdays. An hour or so every day is much better and realistic.
- throwaway98237 10y ago
  Great point about forgetting the material. If you really want to learn something you need to review it more than once, and you need to encounter it in more than one environment / context (unless you're a genius, maybe). It's science, yo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition & context based learning --> https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word
  - ianai 10y ago
    I learned that from math literature. To really solidify a topic you need to express it in as many ways and "different angles" as possible. It's related to the more ways you've seen a problem solved the better your understanding.
- Jach 10y ago
  Depending on the material it is doable over the course of a few weekends. Consider many college courses meet twice a week for one hour each time, so two hours a week. ~14 weeks leaves only 28 hours of in class instruction time. Devote three of your weekends this month to complete study and you'll easily match the hourly total lecture-wise (you could even do it in one weekend if you're hardcore), what can kill you is the exercises, and the time it takes for actually learning the material. Despite meeting more frequently I don't think college students learn the material any better than an upfront binge learner, because most of them have no clue how to actually learn something. They read and cram exercises enough to match the patterns and pass by (a sort of compressed periodic binge learning), and then they're done. Course interdependence forces some amount of actual learning that lasts but not that much. Anyway to pull off the weekend study you wouldn't spend 6 hours on each day of your weekends just "reading". You would be reading (not necessarily in order or even every page), doing exercises, creating mnemonics, finding other resources to clear something up, and possibly making some flash cards to take advantage of spaced repetition later, which has an important characteristic that you don't need to review every day for an hour, only at the moment before you'd naturally forget which could be days, months, or years away. Depending on the subject you may also just be "practicing", for whatever that means for the subject. (Writing programs is a common programmer method to supplement in the learning of something.) Another benefit to the intense approach is that you create many associations up front, instead of living in confusion until (if you don't give up beforehand) your slow and steady schedule advances to the point where learning something new makes enough older things click together. If you're just casually reading for 6 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, and do no review, and have no intensity of making it an active exercise instead of a passive reading-only one, then yeah, you're not going to learn anything, but I doubt you'd learn much more by converting the same behavior to an hour a day.
  - tech2 10y ago
    I always thought the point of a university was to teach you _how_ to learn, the actual material learned being an added bonus.
    - Jach 10y ago
andrew_wc_brown 10y ago
I think such books are pointless if you aren't going to use them in your day-to-day work.
- fao_ 10y ago
  You don't believe in knowledge for the sake of enjoying the perspective that more knowledge gives you?
  - johndubchak 10y ago
    +1
  - sbov 10y ago
    I do, but with a kid my time is now limited. Unused knowledge has this habit of being forgotten. It turns out to be a terrible waste, at least from my POV.
    - hilop 10y ago
      Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses. It's a terrible waste.
      - edmccard 10y ago
        >Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses. And swinging a bat is one of the skills baseball players need to use for their job. The comment you replied to was talking about skills that are not going to be used every day. So I don't think your analogy is very useful.
        oldmanjay 10y ago
        Also, people who get paid to play baseball never have a batting average that low
        10y ago
yellowapple 10y ago
I rarely "finish" a technical book. I instead skim over it once or twice and then keep it on hand as a reference. Some books are indeed worth reading front-to-back and in-depth, but usually the use as reference material is more important to me.
cruise02 10y ago
It probably isn't if you're coming at the material for the first time, or after a long break. I took a 15-week course in Linear Algebra a few months ago, and we only covered about half the book in that time. I spent just about every weekend and evening doing those exercises. It's very time consuming. However, if you gave me my old College Algebra book, I might be able to skim through it in a month of weekends and refresh myself on most of it, because I've used that stuff a lot in various jobs. Same goes for a lot of (but by no means all) programming books. I'm immersed in that stuff daily, so I can get through it pretty quickly.
- smnplk 10y ago
  Well, math really isn't a spectator sport. You have to do the work on your own, reading is only part of the work. A very time consuming hobby indeed.
  - jimmaswell 10y ago
    It depends. I tend to remember a fair amount of material in math classes from just paying attention. I rarely explicitly study at all for math classes and when I do the results are mixed. Example: In calculus 2 there were all those annoying weird trig integral forms. I couldn't remember them all because it was like a new one arrived daily for a while. I set out to do practice problems with them but still didn't remember much and did poorly on parts of tests that required them. Other things like arc length, double integrals, integration by parts or integrating vertically instead of horizontally, all were just intuitive to me and I remembered them without trying to. I'm not sure how typical or not my results are but in general throughout school if I felt the need to study something and practice it, it was bad news, but if something made sense to me it stuck without much further effort.
    - pyromine 10y ago
      I'll add on my own anecdote here, I'm a stats major and I've found that in my stats (as opposed to pure math) classes, I find the learning is very much done just by reading the book because every new concept is just an intuitive application of earlier ones, once introduced to the concept I can understand it even without working through the excercises. In my more pure math classes (and admittedly in some topics like counting problems) I have to spend a lore more time doing exercises to actually have a grasp of the material. It's frustrating but that's just how life goes.
questionr 10y ago
created a thread asking just this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12718444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12718444

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

asimuvPR 10y ago

Some people are able to do it. But most are exaggerating or not doing the exercises. It takes me weeks to properly finish a good technical book due to time constraints. Either way, just do your best and forget about anybody else.

lamby 10y ago

Mmm. Besides, I find my programming/work/etc. improves when I read novels in my spare time :)

happy-go-lucky 10y ago
On the contrary, I find my work/family life improves when I do nothing in my spare time ヅ

peruvian 10y ago

Over the weekend? I can't do it. Even if I forced myself to read for 6 hours Saturday and Sunday I'd forget everything during the weekdays. An hour or so every day is much better and realistic.

throwaway98237 10y ago
Great point about forgetting the material. If you really want to learn something you need to review it more than once, and you need to encounter it in more than one environment / context (unless you're a genius, maybe). It's science, yo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition & context based learning --> https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word
- ianai 10y ago
  I learned that from math literature. To really solidify a topic you need to express it in as many ways and "different angles" as possible. It's related to the more ways you've seen a problem solved the better your understanding.
Jach 10y ago
Depending on the material it is doable over the course of a few weekends. Consider many college courses meet twice a week for one hour each time, so two hours a week. ~14 weeks leaves only 28 hours of in class instruction time. Devote three of your weekends this month to complete study and you'll easily match the hourly total lecture-wise (you could even do it in one weekend if you're hardcore), what can kill you is the exercises, and the time it takes for actually learning the material. Despite meeting more frequently I don't think college students learn the material any better than an upfront binge learner, because most of them have no clue how to actually learn something. They read and cram exercises enough to match the patterns and pass by (a sort of compressed periodic binge learning), and then they're done. Course interdependence forces some amount of actual learning that lasts but not that much. Anyway to pull off the weekend study you wouldn't spend 6 hours on each day of your weekends just "reading". You would be reading (not necessarily in order or even every page), doing exercises, creating mnemonics, finding other resources to clear something up, and possibly making some flash cards to take advantage of spaced repetition later, which has an important characteristic that you don't need to review every day for an hour, only at the moment before you'd naturally forget which could be days, months, or years away. Depending on the subject you may also just be "practicing", for whatever that means for the subject. (Writing programs is a common programmer method to supplement in the learning of something.) Another benefit to the intense approach is that you create many associations up front, instead of living in confusion until (if you don't give up beforehand) your slow and steady schedule advances to the point where learning something new makes enough older things click together. If you're just casually reading for 6 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, and do no review, and have no intensity of making it an active exercise instead of a passive reading-only one, then yeah, you're not going to learn anything, but I doubt you'd learn much more by converting the same behavior to an hour a day.
- tech2 10y ago
  I always thought the point of a university was to teach you _how_ to learn, the actual material learned being an added bonus.
  - Jach 10y ago

andrew_wc_brown 10y ago

I think such books are pointless if you aren't going to use them in your day-to-day work.

fao_ 10y ago
You don't believe in knowledge for the sake of enjoying the perspective that more knowledge gives you?
- johndubchak 10y ago
  +1
- sbov 10y ago
  I do, but with a kid my time is now limited. Unused knowledge has this habit of being forgotten. It turns out to be a terrible waste, at least from my POV.
  - hilop 10y ago
    Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses. It's a terrible waste.
    - edmccard 10y ago
      >Baseball players waste 9 of every 10 swings on misses. And swinging a bat is one of the skills baseball players need to use for their job. The comment you replied to was talking about skills that are not going to be used every day. So I don't think your analogy is very useful.
      - oldmanjay 10y ago
        Also, people who get paid to play baseball never have a batting average that low
        10y ago

yellowapple 10y ago

I rarely "finish" a technical book. I instead skim over it once or twice and then keep it on hand as a reference. Some books are indeed worth reading front-to-back and in-depth, but usually the use as reference material is more important to me.

cruise02 10y ago

It probably isn't if you're coming at the material for the first time, or after a long break. I took a 15-week course in Linear Algebra a few months ago, and we only covered about half the book in that time. I spent just about every weekend and evening doing those exercises. It's very time consuming. However, if you gave me my old College Algebra book, I might be able to skim through it in a month of weekends and refresh myself on most of it, because I've used that stuff a lot in various jobs. Same goes for a lot of (but by no means all) programming books. I'm immersed in that stuff daily, so I can get through it pretty quickly.

smnplk 10y ago
Well, math really isn't a spectator sport. You have to do the work on your own, reading is only part of the work. A very time consuming hobby indeed.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  It depends. I tend to remember a fair amount of material in math classes from just paying attention. I rarely explicitly study at all for math classes and when I do the results are mixed. Example: In calculus 2 there were all those annoying weird trig integral forms. I couldn't remember them all because it was like a new one arrived daily for a while. I set out to do practice problems with them but still didn't remember much and did poorly on parts of tests that required them. Other things like arc length, double integrals, integration by parts or integrating vertically instead of horizontally, all were just intuitive to me and I remembered them without trying to. I'm not sure how typical or not my results are but in general throughout school if I felt the need to study something and practice it, it was bad news, but if something made sense to me it stuck without much further effort.
  - pyromine 10y ago
    I'll add on my own anecdote here, I'm a stats major and I've found that in my stats (as opposed to pure math) classes, I find the learning is very much done just by reading the book because every new concept is just an intuitive application of earlier ones, once introduced to the concept I can understand it even without working through the excercises. In my more pure math classes (and admittedly in some topics like counting problems) I have to spend a lore more time doing exercises to actually have a grasp of the material. It's frustrating but that's just how life goes.

questionr 10y ago

created a thread asking just this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12718444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12718444