Comment by thejameskyle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thejameskyle | Hacker News Reader

Hi I wrote this thing. I guess I'll comment on this thread since it got some attention.

I think a lot of people that are in this thread went into this project with the complete wrong state of mind.

I'm not trying to teach people how a hash table or linked list implementation works. I'm not trying to make a library that is useful to anyone.

What I'm trying to do is connect the dots between a bunch of different important concepts in data structures.

People can go read things about each of these individual topics to great length and I encourage them too, but in general there are a lot of great computer science resources for just piecing a lot of related topics together for beginners.

Sure you can read a 600 page book that will cover things from end to end, but those are very intimidating when you have no prior knowledge of the topic and sometimes you don't get as much out of them if you don't know the basics.

If I can provide people with just a quick highlight reel of essential knowledge of data structures then I've done what I set out to do.

I hope Hacker News can appreciate that, I don't expect it to, but I can hope.

As someone who has implemented all these before, I thought the presentation was great. Yes, there are some holes, but in under 1500 lines, ASCII art and all, a lot was covered. More importantly, the ideas put forward can always be built upon--more data structures, more talk about time/space complexity or even probability (e.g. bloom filters), forays into solving famous problems with those data structures (optimally or not), etc, etc. Whether this is the first and final installment or not, it's a nice contribution.

I didn't read it, because I know the topic already, but also because I found it too long for an overview. If the crowd with reduced attention span is your target group, this doesn't work. This would amount to a 20 pages perhaps. I'd assume that's roughly how much it would need in the 600 page book, too.

Also, there is no TOC to gloss over, the ascii, cute as it is, is harder to fly over than legit text with embedded code snippets.

It perfectly matches up with a 30 minute talk that I gave yesterday. It's meant to be read sequentially not as a reference. It's helped a lot of people already, and this format has worked in the past: the super tiny compiler has been turned into interactive tutorials and even recommended by professors. People love the format and I think it connects with people better.

But then again I don't know why you thought your opinion mattered if you didn't even read it. I guess that is the quality feedback I do expect from Hacker News commentors though.

i for one read it and found it useful. thanks for your time and energy spent making and sharing it.

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