• dawnofdusk 2 hours ago

    The content of the book looks really nice, but I'm not sure why one needs a book that explicitly aims to "engage students" and is also targeted at upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. Surely students at this level have a sufficient level of self motivation to get by... would have preferred to see the same content targeted at first year undergraduates.

    • larodi 19 minutes ago

      As a person teaching information technology to students for more than 20 years now, I can assure you that only fraction of students are that interested. Perhaps many seem interested due to peer or economical pressure.

      Meanwhile economy needs proper new recruits which is impossible statistically at this point.

      We also, back in the day, did not immediately grasp the beauty, and also the need, for programming logic (prolog) or certain discrete structures - things people learn in the universities.

      Yet we learned ourselves to debug and code - by trial and error, by working in friends groups, and loved it. Loved to write code and see things move on the screen. We were just kids in high schools, right, makes us what - 14 at the time? Nobody has ever pushed me or chased me do that.

      Since I started teaching Perl in 2003 (and did so for 10 years on university grounds) I got absolutely convinced that people learn better when they can see the result, when they entertain and generally when something gets to convince them the matter is not so hard at all.

      So, kudos for the book.

      • chaps an hour ago

        As a person who just dives into things, these sorts of resources are helpful to bridge many gaps. It's a nice way to learn more than one thing at the same time. Theory and rote learning has its limits, and the expectation shouldn't necessarily be towards perfect engineers. Breadth can live alongside depth in a wonderful swirl, yo.

      • WheelsAtLarge 7 days ago

        All math books should follow this example. All people who took calculus because they had to, how have you used it? Yes, I know, most of you haven't.

        • elashri 7 minutes ago

          I mean all STEM need to take introductory physics because they will need to understand the basics of how the world works. You can't understand Classical Mechanics and Electromagnetism without calculus.

          Now there are many universities and majors which will give you physics before calculus (forgetting that the original argument were in reverse) or will give some majors what is called Algebra based physics. Which is kind of trust me these are the equations to solve this problem, you just need to solve this algebraic manipulation of numbers. So if I give you any physics problem that requires any further manipulation or derivation then you will realize you did not understand physics well.

          There is also benefits of studying calculus in itself. For example, a lot of optimization techniques that is being used by programmers and ML are rooted from calculus methods.

          • readthenotes1 2 hours ago

            I once used it to get reimbursed properly for local salary taxes I had to pay while at a job site.

            Converging series. Shocked the scumbag HR guy into submission

          • FabHK 2 hours ago

            With coding problems in Julia, nice!