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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

> If you only follow guided resources, you'll wind up in tutorial hell.

I disagree very strongly here. You can wind up in tutorial hell if you only read surface level small to medium sized posts.

My "career superpower" is that I'm always working my way through one textbook or another. You get serious depth this way and avoid getting stuck with a surface level understanding. Plus, with depth you can end up with really strong fundamentals, which make learning the next thing that much easier.

I know a lot of people who read tons of blog posts on topics but never crack open a textbook, or people who watch youtubers explain academic papers yet never open up the actual paper.

Maybe my "learn stuff quickly" trick is... don't. Spend a decade accumulating deep knowledge slowly, and it'll add up. The road to "tutorial hell" is paved with blogposts and missing fundamentals.

(I like the rest of the post)

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Although a lot of computer books in the last couple decades have bought into the model of “let’s teach the language through building a project” structures which often means that they skip key stuff or shoe-horn it into the project in ways that don’t make sense.

The term "career superpower" is great, i find that the ability to relate a current problem to a large collection of notes taken on a daily basis works extremely well.

A lot of information for these notes come from in-depth articles and blog posts and since they are online resources, it is trivial to add them as notes.

Microsoft OneNote has been the go-to tool to keep track of all the notes.

Textbooks do have their place for hard problems, e.g. algorithms or AI. But these problems tend to be hard to solve quickly, if at all.

> The road to "tutorial hell" is paved with blogposts and missing fundamentals

Even worse is that blog posts can have incorrect, bad, or even dangerous information. If you've just found it in a search, you have no idea of the skill level of the author.

I recently came across a post about a JavaScript WYSIWYG editor which stated that you didn't need to worry about sanitizing the HTML output from it because it took care of that for you. An attacker could of course send malicious data straight to the server or manipulate the client code however they want, so without also sanitizing on the server (also a hard problem), this opens a huge security hole. Ten years ago I probably would have naively followed this and thought everything was okay.

Tutorials are often useful, but they also cannot be trusted, especially without other resources. I feel I've learned the most from reading in-depth sources like official docs, specs, RFCs, or the source code of high-quality, well-maintained libraries. It can be harder at first, but I learn things I wouldn't have thought to look for, and there is something of a consistency in presentation (at least by comparison) that makes each additional one easier to go through.

Agreed. The OP says,

> It's often said that the internet has democratized education: the sum of human knowledge is only a Google search away!

Mediocre to bad information is a Google search away (unless it's Google Scholar). Generally speaking, the published knowledge is orders of magnitude more valuable; don't waste your time and pollute your thinking on what you find on the open Internet.

To be fair, I've skimmed a lot of tech books that were absolute trash. I would say the level of quality on blog posts and books are about the same; it's just easier to filter out trash books by reading reviews (unfortunately, I've worked in a lot of niche areas where it didn't matter what the review score was for a book, I just needed some resource to push me further).

I'm not referring to every book and every blog post. My point is that there are books, easily found, that are far, far beyond any blog post.

What types of books do you recommend? E.g. the one I've found most useful are from the CS curriculum, the industry ones are hit and miss, even the O'Reilly's.

two thumbs up for this comment ^

May I ask you some text books you've read and on your reading list?

Oh man, it's tough to answer this one well. I just counted up the books I've worked through on my shelf. After college, I've gone through about 15 completely, and partially worked through another 15 or so. Plus a couple reference texts that have been handy. Plus a huge number of papers. They take up nearly twice the space my old college texts do, which is kind of wild to look back on!

Are you curious about anything in particular? Or if you're just wondering what kind of books I'm talking about, highlights include CLRS, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Mostly Harmless Econometrics, and Characters & Viewpoint. Next up on my list are more creative writing books and a couple theoretical stats books (I'm working towards a book on semiparametrics, but first need a better foundation to follow a book I've been recommended).

> You can wind up in tutorial hell if you only read surface level small to medium sized posts.

This.

Absolutely this.

It feels like everyone either hasn't read the rest of the article, or conveniently ignored the "Mixing guided and unguided learning" section, then went on to cherry-pick quotes to trash the article. The irony...

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