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Am I the only one who prefers blog posts, examples and wikipedia to textbooks? For anything IT related, anyway. Textbooks are cripplingly sparse. They yak and
by guard-of-terra 15y ago
Am I the only one who prefers blog posts, examples and wikipedia to textbooks? For anything IT related, anyway.
Textbooks are cripplingly sparse. They yak and yak and yak for a few pages on a concept you're figured out from the first sentence.
I would like a zoomable textbook. One which presents you a list of tl;dr explanations about every topic covered (one-two pages per book), but you may click on any topic and get a thorough description of it, and then I can click on any claim in that and get more specialized information and so on down to turtles.
I would like articles that way too.
- DanBC 15y agoI wish the wikipedia leads were more concise. A two sentence description of the concept in the most basic understandable language possible. Then the next paragraph can be a more accurate lead. The the content list; then the contents. Your zoomable book idea is a good one. I'd prefer authority with good cites over crowd-sourced with semi-random citing.
- theoretick 15y agoI recommend checking out the "Simple English" wikipedia for more complex topics. It breaks those sentences down even more and is fantastic for math articles and the like.
- BenoitEssiambre 15y agoYou may want to check out my html5 textbook platform experiment. http://www.bookvoid.com http://www.bookvoid.com It is designed around this "zoomable" principle. Coincidentally, the "zoomable" aspect was inspired by some of Elizer Yudkowsky's posts who I believe is a founder of LessWrong.