Hacker News Reader

Comment by henrikeh | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how this is an argument for how “books don’t work”. The author’s point seems to be that books don’t support learning, because books are static and can’t adapt to the thinking and working process of the reader/student. Something more is needed to “learn”.

This implies that the purpose of books is to “teach”, but is that so? Books at best “inform”. It is up to the reader to bring the framework for learning, be it the class setting, a study group or just experience enough to self-study.

View on HN

I kept reading and reading, waiting for him to say what he thought _did_ work, then, and at the very end he finally got to what seems to have been his attempt at a point: he can conceive of some as-of-yet uninvented perfect knowledge transfer device that outperforms books, so hopefully somebody will be inspired by his post to invent one.

Some books explicitly claim to teach you a specific skill. And some people have that general expectation towards books. This is what the author criticizes, as I understood their points.

Generally, books that attempt to teach a specific skill will be full of exercises. If you read through the book methodically (not like reading a novel) and do all the exercises, I would be shocked if you did not learn that skill.

I guess a lot of people don’t do that. They skim through a textbook like it’s a boring novel and they make a few notes or they highlight everything or they fill the poor book with sticky notes in a multitude of colours. Anything but doing the exercises! And then is it any wonder why they forget everything a year later?

Yeah of course, if I'm already in the process of acquiring some skill, willing to do all the exercises, look up what I don't understand somewhere else, etc., I will learn that skill and the book will help and be a good foundation or guideline.

But the point remains: Just reading the book, as in consuming page after page, is not enough.

This, so many times.

Indeed, books do not "work." Dedicated students work, and by doing so, they will learn.

None of the mentioned books teach specific skill through. And I had success learning new skills from books, but those books were meant to teach that skills. They were not among top popular, because for whatever skill you have in mind, only few people actually want to learn it at the same time.

Not that all book that claim to teach skill actually teach it, but plenty of them do.

Certain publishers will always market their goods by promising to teach you the secrets of SQL [or insert field] in 10 minutes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com