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Comment by steveeq1 | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat unrelated but here is Bret Victor's reading list for anyone that's interested: https://gist.github.com/nickloewen/10565777

alan kay is a big fan of his.

The depressing things about reading lists is that it's hard to go through all of them. Many of the books list (SICP) take a long time to wade through, read, and program the examples. They are not "light reading".

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SICP also requires a fair bit of Mathematical maturity which threw me off when I tried to go through it.

Only at the beginning. I found the first couple of chapters around algebra to be a turn off. But once I got past that, I found it a lot more engaging.

(Not that there's anything wrong with those chapters. If someone happens to like them, great. It's your time. Read the book the way that works best for you.)

That’s not quite true, I remember going through SICP easily before I learned post-high school math (which included relearning some basic algebra) when I went on my own self guided CS course. The lectures on YouTube are particularly accessible to newbies too with basic math and programming knowledge.

Did you do the problem sets? The book makes a lot of references to make theorems and number theory that the average laymen wouldn't understand.

It doesn't. There's a few math heavy exercises in the first chapter, and the math is generally explained as it goes along too. Except for the first chapter, it's pretty math-free.

That doesn’t make it not quite true. You may be gifted at the subject. I was not and couldn’t get through SICP. You need a mind for mathematics or the requisite education in mathematics before doing SICP.

Very true. The calculus references halfway through the course puts many people off.

Thanks for sharing this—I had forgotten about it!

That gist is copied from this page on Victor's site: http://worrydream.com/#!/Links

It was discussed on HN in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578795

You don’t have to read 100% of every single book. Even just going through the first few chapters of SICP (or other similarly dense, more theoretical text) would most likely be beneficial to those who have never worked through the material before.

Also, by reading the classics/greats, you get the style of their thinking—something missed in a summary of the book, or someone else's re-presentation of it. In training, what you are taught is the important thing; but education is in being exposed to ways of thinking characteristic of a particular field, and the styles of thinking of particular teachers/writers.

The constant recommendation of successful scientists is to "Go to the masters, not the commentators." It is the master who, by definition, has the right style, and often the commentators give the results without the essence—style!

— Richard Hamming, Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics, Prologue

Thanks for posting this. I had not seen it before.

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