5 ms·
Ask HN: Benefits of technical books beyond transferring knowledge?
Nonfiction books provide background knowledge. They're also generally well written and thus improve one's language, which could also apply to fiction books.
Technical books, however, contain a lot of technical concepts, less background knowledge, and are written more with the aim to convey concepts efficiently rather than for the sake of being well written. With that in mind, could technical books still provide any benefit beyond the technical knowledge they aim to transfer?
- dennybritz 12y agoI've used technical books to learn (or rather, improve my grasp of) a different language. Learning from nonfiction books is difficult because the vocabulary and grammar is usually quite advanced. A lot of the concepts found in technical books are already familiar to the reader so that reading them, even in another language, turns out to be much easier.