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Textbooks in general (like academic textbooks, not orielly style books). Work through a textbook or three each year, and once you’re a decade into your career i

Textbooks in general (like academic textbooks, not orielly style books). Work through a textbook or three each year, and once you’re a decade into your career it’s like you have another degree under your belt. Find something you want to dive deep on and instead of reading a dozen blogs, buy the textbook and do some of the exercises as you go. It keeps you spending time in foundational stuff rather than specific frameworks, and it pays incredible dividends. It’s slow as hell, and only really pays off on many year timescales, but don’t discount it for that.

nwhitehead 6y ago
This is a good one. It is all too easy to spend years casually "interested" in a topic without developing a true foundation of the important ideas in the field. In my case I spent two decades casually reading about economics. But then one day I ordered an economics textbook to work through the problems, and found out that I basically knew nothing and couldn't do any of the problems. A few months of slowly working through the textbook gave me a much deeper level of understanding. I could do the problems now.
mannymanman 6y ago
Examples of textbooks you have used?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  I just looked through my bookshelves and here’s what I’ve been through since college (in no particular order other than top to bottom on my shelves): 7 books on general ML (highlights: Murphy’s Machine Learning, Hastie et al’s ESL, Koller&Friedman’s PGMs) 5 on more specialized ML (highlights: Agarwal&Chen’s statistical recommender systems book, Manning&Schutze’s statistical NLP, Settles’ active learning) 13 on stats (highlights: Wooldridge’s econometrics of x-section/panel data, Angrist&Pischke’s econometrics) 4 on numerical methods (highlight: Absil et al’s optimization on matrix manifolds) 4 on CS (highlight: CLRS’s intro to algorithms) 10 on calculus/geometry/topology/algebra (highlights: Bachman’s geometric approach to differential forms, Hestenes&Sobzyk's Clifford algebra to geometric calculus) 8 on fiction writing (highlight: Bickham’s Scene & Structure) And Rosenberg‘s Nonviolent Communication (not a textbook, but still a highlight worth mentioning). It amounts to between 3 and 4 per year. Looking back and counting them up, my reaction is holy crap that’s a lot, but that’s kinda the point. Each year it is a reasonable amount of self study. Not nothing, but not anything crazy. Over the course of many years, it adds up to a hell of a lever.

nwhitehead 6y ago

This is a good one. It is all too easy to spend years casually "interested" in a topic without developing a true foundation of the important ideas in the field. In my case I spent two decades casually reading about economics. But then one day I ordered an economics textbook to work through the problems, and found out that I basically knew nothing and couldn't do any of the problems. A few months of slowly working through the textbook gave me a much deeper level of understanding. I could do the problems now.

mannymanman 6y ago

Examples of textbooks you have used?

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
I just looked through my bookshelves and here’s what I’ve been through since college (in no particular order other than top to bottom on my shelves): 7 books on general ML (highlights: Murphy’s Machine Learning, Hastie et al’s ESL, Koller&Friedman’s PGMs) 5 on more specialized ML (highlights: Agarwal&Chen’s statistical recommender systems book, Manning&Schutze’s statistical NLP, Settles’ active learning) 13 on stats (highlights: Wooldridge’s econometrics of x-section/panel data, Angrist&Pischke’s econometrics) 4 on numerical methods (highlight: Absil et al’s optimization on matrix manifolds) 4 on CS (highlight: CLRS’s intro to algorithms) 10 on calculus/geometry/topology/algebra (highlights: Bachman’s geometric approach to differential forms, Hestenes&Sobzyk's Clifford algebra to geometric calculus) 8 on fiction writing (highlight: Bickham’s Scene & Structure) And Rosenberg‘s Nonviolent Communication (not a textbook, but still a highlight worth mentioning). It amounts to between 3 and 4 per year. Looking back and counting them up, my reaction is holy crap that’s a lot, but that’s kinda the point. Each year it is a reasonable amount of self study. Not nothing, but not anything crazy. Over the course of many years, it adds up to a hell of a lever.