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"Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? " Why is this so surprising? I know many people who've read many thousands of books. I've read thousands of boo
by plinkplonk 16y ago
"Have Peter Norvig really read that many books? "
Why is this so surprising? I know many people who've read many thousands of books. I've read thousands of books cover to cover, I have about a thousand books in my library at home (about 300 ish technical books - I gave away another 300 or so) and I am still in my thirties (Fwiw I started reading by myself when I was 3. I buy a book every two weeks or so these days).
Even if you restrict the scope to technical books(assuming they have to be read relatively slowly) reading and completely understanding the content of a few hundred technical books is well within the scope of a human lifetime. It isn't even that hard if you work steadily in a disciplined fashion.
"And to top it, majority of books he has listed are pretty heavy and dense books."
"Density" is a function of what kind of background you already have. Dr.Norvig has a degree in Applied Math (Erdos number 4 I believe) and a PhD in Computer Science. I am sure he can read a "dense" tract faster than most people could. Also, most of those books (I own some of them) are textbooks. They aren't really all that "dense" (compared to a PhD thesis in Pure Mathematics, say). Most advanced material in CS/AI is in conference papers and rarely, if ever, make their way into textbooks till years after publication. I bet Peter Norvig reads a thousand or so papers every year. Every CS researcher I know does.
- wisty 16y agoI've heard him called the no. 1 AI guy, in the world. He's basically Google's head researcher, and used to head search quality, he's been big in NASA, worked in industry, and written the no. 1 AI book for students. I expect he's had to read a few books to get to where he is. Also, he probably knew 80% of the content before he read it. Most of those books will have a chapter on vectors, a chapter on probability, a chapter on information (etc), and he's mastered that years ago ...
- bl4k 16y agobecause the subject of these books is not read, it is learnt I can also skim through TCP/IP Ill. SICP, Dragon book, and say that I have 'read' them, but the impressive thing here is that Norvig is super smart, and probably has not only read all of these books, but understands them all.
- swah 16y agoDo you allocate some fixed time or number of pages as a goal to read every day ? When I start programming it takes up all available time..
- jshen 16y agoI've started allocating a fixed amount of time for learning everyone week. This mostly consists of working my way through books like these and writing some small scripts that utilizes the material on some data I have.