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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

To the contrary, some of the best books have so much knowledge in them that you instantly level-up many notches with a single chapter.

For instance, reading The Pragmatic Programmer and JavaScript: The Good Parts early-on changed my professional life irrevocably, both in terms of programming and career.

I am sure there are various other books like those that truly are impactful, and it doesn't hurt to look up recommendations for those from people who are experts / polymaths.

The case against wikis (with the exception of design docs) and blog posts is that they are erratic, restricted, unedited, stale, and low on pedagogical focus. Some of the books are meticulously structured-- there's no comparison.

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"low on pedagogical focus"

Although I have some duds, the hundreds of pages of wiki contributions I've made are nearly all designed to be what I wished existed when I was learning said details. Sadly, they only help to a certain degree. The individual really needs to want to learn to get any real lasting benefit.

May I ask you what you wrote? I’m interested.

Internal team wiki covering my industry which is power systems (transmission level stuff).

>what I wished existed when I was learning said details.

This isn't what 'pedagogical focus' means though. Just writing down the stuff that helped you out very rarely covers what is necessary to help people out in general.

A pedagogically focused approach would also cover the assumptions you had going in and provide clear references to expected prerequisites. It should also cover the "why" for a specific approach if there are multiple approaches, which is very frequently left out of internal documentation wikis.

I hate these books. Basically it's just synonyms for well known concepts, like blue in language b is called gog and orange in language a is called koom. It extends to more complex concepts as well like this is how you do an if statement in python vs. c++. For JavaScript the good parts it's this type of book. Literally nothing new is learned save how to rename the some concept as the good part of JavaScript. Details that you can learn any time.

What I want from a book is to learn new concepts. For example functions and data are the same thing. Or recursion and a loop + stack are isomorphic concepts. Or that unit tests only verify one test case of your program correct while a proof based systems like type checking can verify an entire domain of your program correct.

If you want innovative mind bending concepts read a book about Lisp. Paul Graham's "On Lisp" is great - and I've heard good things about "Let over Lambda".

Lisp is such and open mental playground when it comes to programming.

Vs the languages which consist of the exact same ideas with a slightly different syntax.

It's on my bucket list along with smalltalk. Ive done some sicp and it's definitely mind opening.

Right now I'm on a different route that I think is much more harder. Haskell, type checking, category theory, Idris and dependent typing.

I went that route, and found it less bang for the buck.

Still interesting, but a lot of learn, but it took significantly more effort to see any type of reward. And the total reward is definitely less than that of lisp (from what I encountered).

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