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Comment by dawnofdusk | Hacker News Reader

The content of the book looks really nice, but I'm not sure why one needs a book that explicitly aims to "engage students" and is also targeted at upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. Surely students at this level have a sufficient level of self motivation to get by... would have preferred to see the same content targeted at first year undergraduates.

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As a person teaching information technology to students for more than 20 years now, I can assure you that only fraction of students are that interested. Perhaps many seem interested due to peer or economical pressure.

Meanwhile economy needs proper new recruits which is impossible statistically at this point.

We also, back in the day, did not immediately grasp the beauty, and also the need, for programming logic (prolog) or certain discrete structures - things people learn in the universities.

Yet we learned ourselves to debug and code - by trial and error, by working in friends groups, and loved it. Loved to write code and see things move on the screen. We were just kids in high schools, right, makes us what - 14 at the time? Nobody has ever pushed me or chased me do that.

Since I started teaching Perl in 2003 (and did so for 10 years on university grounds) I got absolutely convinced that people learn better when they can see the result, when they entertain and generally when something gets to convince them the matter is not so hard at all.

So, kudos for the book.

As a person who just dives into things, these sorts of resources are helpful to bridge many gaps. It's a nice way to learn more than one thing at the same time. Theory and rote learning has its limits, and the expectation shouldn't necessarily be towards perfect engineers. Breadth can live alongside depth in a wonderful swirl, yo.

There is another University of Michigan professor who created an Introduction to Computational Linear Algebra course: https://grizzle.robotics.umich.edu/education/rob101.html

with free textbook: https://grizzle.robotics.umich.edu/files/ROB_101_Textbook_W_...

Nope. Many engineering students take maths courses purely because they are compulsory, and many have no interest in theory and struggle with abstraction (which is often how they view maths in general, even though engineering maths is very concrete relative to what many mathematicians do). The thing is, you need proficiency in the basic tools and skills to be able to do the interesting applications later, and tools and skills in isolation seem abstract. Working to keep students engaged in a maths course when they're not doing a maths degree is an important part of that teaching.

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