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Distinguish between base knowledge and tangential knowledge. Within computer science: a) base knowledge is knowledge that is required to get an understanding

Distinguish between base knowledge and tangential knowledge. Within computer science: a) base knowledge is knowledge that is required to get an understanding of how things work: e.g. O-notation, (notion of) difference between mean running time and worst case. Mythical Man-Month. If is very important spending time learning this kind of knowledge. b) tangential knowledge is knowledge you always can read up on at a later time (on a job) when required to: APIs, sort algorithms, including knowing how quicksort works. It is very often a waste of time learning tangential knowledge. The more you get into academica, the more work you are presented with, and it will be more than you will ever be able to do. You need to be intelligent about where you apply (most of) your effort so you get the most bang for the buck. If you spend too much time learning tangential knowledge, you won't learn the base knowledge and will end up worse than if you slacked but focused on base knowledge. Whenever you are presented with work, ask yourself: will doing this provide me with more understanding, or is it just more of the same I've already done. You are not given work just to do the work, you are given the work as an opportunity to learn. tl;dr: If a part of your homework doesn't make you learn anything, there is no reason performing it.

kunjaan 16y ago
This is a very very bad advice. I almost feel like hitting you for this. DO NOT JUDGE HOMEWORKS. DO NOT SEPARATE knowledge into "base " and "tangential" especially when you are learning something in a course because many times th so called "tangential knowledge" is there to reinforce your "base knowledge". I will take an example that you gave. If a student takes Algorithm design class, you would separate the class into the core design principles as "base" and the other as "tangential". However, the concrete algorithms are there to reinforce the design principles, to describe the abstraction layers that we have built etc. If a student doesn't work hard to learn about the working of the algorithm, he would probably miss out on important aspects like the power of invariance, the power of recurrence, the hurdle in analyzing the recurrence, the nonintuitive correctness of these algorithms. These are all implicit knowledges. The teacher would probably just mention it and move on in the lecture. But the assignments, the problem sets, the midterm, the final exam are there to reinforce all these small lessons that would probably be missed. DO NOT JUDGE HOMEWORKS. As a student you may have no idea about what is important and what is not. Even if you feel you are not learning anything, do them, redo them, revise them and perform well in them. You never know the skills that you may pick up along the way that will make you a better computer scientist. tl;dr If you seriously doubt the purpose of the assignment, ask the teacher or the TA.

kunjaan 16y ago

This is a very very bad advice. I almost feel like hitting you for this. DO NOT JUDGE HOMEWORKS. DO NOT SEPARATE knowledge into "base " and "tangential" especially when you are learning something in a course because many times th so called "tangential knowledge" is there to reinforce your "base knowledge". I will take an example that you gave. If a student takes Algorithm design class, you would separate the class into the core design principles as "base" and the other as "tangential". However, the concrete algorithms are there to reinforce the design principles, to describe the abstraction layers that we have built etc. If a student doesn't work hard to learn about the working of the algorithm, he would probably miss out on important aspects like the power of invariance, the power of recurrence, the hurdle in analyzing the recurrence, the nonintuitive correctness of these algorithms. These are all implicit knowledges. The teacher would probably just mention it and move on in the lecture. But the assignments, the problem sets, the midterm, the final exam are there to reinforce all these small lessons that would probably be missed. DO NOT JUDGE HOMEWORKS. As a student you may have no idea about what is important and what is not. Even if you feel you are not learning anything, do them, redo them, revise them and perform well in them. You never know the skills that you may pick up along the way that will make you a better computer scientist. tl;dr If you seriously doubt the purpose of the assignment, ask the teacher or the TA.