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I find his views on learning from text books vs reading literature interesting. The problem I have with this self directed kind of learning is that sooner or la

I find his views on learning from text books vs reading literature interesting. The problem I have with this self directed kind of learning is that sooner or later I always get stuck and have no one to ask questions to. For example, I'm currently going through this book on neural networks that someone posted last week (http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/neural/ http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/neural/). However, when I get to the exercises at the end of the chapter, I inevitably fail to complete some of them. Most of the time I don't even want the answer, since that defeats the purpose, but some kind of hint to get me going in the right direction would be really useful. It would be perfect if you could just ask someone who knows the area. Anyone doing a lot of self directed learning from text books with suggestions?

tgittos 17y ago
I spend a lot of my free time doing self directed learning from text books and frequently hit a wall where I don't know where to even begin. Usually I recognise this as either an incomplete understanding of the topic, or a representation of the problem that I'm not familiar with. When this happens, I usually make a note of the question or topic, and specific questions I have that are preventing me from understanding the problem, and I seek out different sources of similar knowledge. I find different authors present ideas and concepts in different ways, and sometimes if a concept isn't clear in one text, it's clear in another. In your specific example, I'd recommend seeking another book or article on neural networks and skim it until you find information on the concept you're stuck with, and see if it can add any pieces to the puzzle. If that fails, sometimes just forgetting about it and proceeding will unlock understanding at random later on, usually in the shower in my case.

tgittos 17y ago

I spend a lot of my free time doing self directed learning from text books and frequently hit a wall where I don't know where to even begin. Usually I recognise this as either an incomplete understanding of the topic, or a representation of the problem that I'm not familiar with. When this happens, I usually make a note of the question or topic, and specific questions I have that are preventing me from understanding the problem, and I seek out different sources of similar knowledge. I find different authors present ideas and concepts in different ways, and sometimes if a concept isn't clear in one text, it's clear in another. In your specific example, I'd recommend seeking another book or article on neural networks and skim it until you find information on the concept you're stuck with, and see if it can add any pieces to the puzzle. If that fails, sometimes just forgetting about it and proceeding will unlock understanding at random later on, usually in the shower in my case.