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>It's especially bad in math, in which writers have a long tradition of deliberately concealing difficult steps and leaving them "as an exercise to the reader".
by Herring 17y ago
>It's especially bad in math, in which writers have a long tradition of deliberately concealing difficult steps and leaving them "as an exercise to the reader".
You're supposed to do those exercises. If you're a programmer think of them as unit tests. In technical subjects, most of the information is contained in the problem sets. For that reason I'd actually say the texts are more informative - more detailed.
- krzyk 17y agoYeah, it's ok when you know the answer (e.g. when you have to provide a proof of some theorem), but when you have a excercise section at the end of the chapter some books do not provide answers to those excercises. It's like having unit tests without knowing if the correct solution is e.g. 2 or 5.
- Herring 17y agoI'd say I almost always get 70%+ of the benefit just by having an answer. And there's other techniques that help, eg checking one problem against other problems, getting a bound on your error, asking on forums/mailing lists, etc.