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Not defending the OP but at the same time I've never approached a brand new subject and had a textbook or similar resource which walked me through it perfectly

Not defending the OP but at the same time I've never approached a brand new subject and had a textbook or similar resource which walked me through it perfectly without having to look up words I did not understand or reference other materials. That is kind of just part of the process. Having subjected myself to the world of machine learning over the past several years I can tell you I constantly encountered things I did not understand, so much so that it became routine to just go look it up and move on.

shakna 10y ago
> I've never approached a brand new subject and had a textbook or similar resource which walked me through it perfectly without having to look up words I did not understand or reference other materials. Never? That sounds like you've always been taught things the hard way. I learned about Pi by nearly the same method of Pythagoras. Methods come first, and the words come later. Build upon the knowledge people have, don't just plop a steaming pile of high level concepts in their lap and expect them to figure it out. I'm sorry you've never really seen that before, but it's how I see all the greats explain things. Take for example, Novig's Lisp interpreter in Python [0], he does expect some back knowledge. But he explains the core ideas, and then each new idea introduced just expands on the previous. [0] http://norvig.com/lispy.html http://norvig.com/lispy.html
- nightski 10y ago
  If you are going to limit learning to resources perfectly catered to your level of knowledge, then you are missing out on a lot. It's really not hard to go look up a few terms.
  - shakna 10y ago
    And equally, if you delve blindly in areas where you don't have the knowledge, you're going to be seriously handicapped. We don't teach physics to those who have never been exposed to algebra, and you can't explain the half life of uranium to someone who doesn't know what an atom is. In practice, we can and do explain... By giving the basics. The beginner who tries to understand the Dragon Book, will get somewhere. They will be enhanced. But nearly as much as if they'd read Lisp In Small Pieces. I have plenty of technical manuals on my shelves. Once, they were utterly useless. Knowledge made them tools. But a beginner can't just leap into Intel's x86 instruction manual and expect it will help, if they don't understand registers, pointers, and that a cpu has a cache.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]

shakna 10y ago

> I've never approached a brand new subject and had a textbook or similar resource which walked me through it perfectly without having to look up words I did not understand or reference other materials. Never? That sounds like you've always been taught things the hard way. I learned about Pi by nearly the same method of Pythagoras. Methods come first, and the words come later. Build upon the knowledge people have, don't just plop a steaming pile of high level concepts in their lap and expect them to figure it out. I'm sorry you've never really seen that before, but it's how I see all the greats explain things. Take for example, Novig's Lisp interpreter in Python [0], he does expect some back knowledge. But he explains the core ideas, and then each new idea introduced just expands on the previous. [0] http://norvig.com/lispy.html http://norvig.com/lispy.html

nightski 10y ago
If you are going to limit learning to resources perfectly catered to your level of knowledge, then you are missing out on a lot. It's really not hard to go look up a few terms.
- shakna 10y ago
  And equally, if you delve blindly in areas where you don't have the knowledge, you're going to be seriously handicapped. We don't teach physics to those who have never been exposed to algebra, and you can't explain the half life of uranium to someone who doesn't know what an atom is. In practice, we can and do explain... By giving the basics. The beginner who tries to understand the Dragon Book, will get somewhere. They will be enhanced. But nearly as much as if they'd read Lisp In Small Pieces. I have plenty of technical manuals on my shelves. Once, they were utterly useless. Knowledge made them tools. But a beginner can't just leap into Intel's x86 instruction manual and expect it will help, if they don't understand registers, pointers, and that a cpu has a cache.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]