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Doing your own research, visiting libraries, reading reviews, etc. These are the best way to find books that you never would have found otherwise. Otherwise y
by peatfreak 7y ago
Doing your own research, visiting libraries, reading reviews, etc. These are the best way to find books that you never would have found otherwise.
Otherwise you're going to end up with the same old stuff (SICP, Release It!, GEB, Code Complete, blah blah blah). Those books are actually good but they are on every single list and even worse, some "modern classics" are actually complete dreck. You might impress your developer friends but you won't advance yourself.
For example when I was studying for my PhD in signal processing and machine learning (before machine learning became popular again) I had to learn a lot about functional analysis. I also needed to learn a small amount of measure theory; and to go appreciably deeper in to time-frequency analysis, probability, and statistics, than I had before.
I discovered many masterpieces of my own accord. I never would have seen them because one lesson I learned during my literature review and actually doing research is that very few people actually read the books and articles they cite. They merely copy bibliographies from one ancestor article to another without knowing why.
- fouc 7y agoYes, the tendency for "winner take all" distributions to happen are annoying as heck.
- balfirevic 7y ago> Those books are actually good but they are on every single list and even worse, some "modern classics" are actually complete dreck. You might impress your developer friends but you won't advance yourself. I don't get it. If these are good books and you have not read them, how will you not advance yourself by reading them?
- atroche 7y agoI think he means if you read the ones that are vaunted but bad you won't advance yourself, not that you can't advance yourself by reading classics.
- blue_devil 7y ago>>visiting libraries This. Lacking the "efficient optimisation" of online search, you may actually discover real, valuable information from original sources.
- FowlSoft2013 7y agoI had an epiphany the other day. These books offer expansive references to where the author found or sourced their material. Looking through there is a great place to start once the standard books have been completed.
- _Understated_ 7y agoInterestingly, the "visiting libraries" bit is something I do frequently - Our 8 year old comes with us and he loves reading too. I tend to buy the books they are throwing out as they're only 20p each. To be fair, there is a lot of terrible books but there's always the odd hidden gem in there. I'd never have found any of them in a search or a review site... gotta love the analog world.
- bigred100 7y agoEven if you don’t explicitly copy it my understanding is there is certain references you are just “supposed to” cite. That’s not then same as having good exposition of course.
- joshvm 7y agoI was always amazed at how few people used the library at university. Lots of people used it as a study space, but hardly any actually took out books unless it was an urgent loan for something. Given how expensive textbooks are, it's well worth taking a bunch out and deciding if you actually want to buy any of them. Especially books outside your field (eg as a physicist I would take out CS books).