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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who can't stand people trying to deliver technical information via power point slides?

Not at all. Slides are to support a talk. I find most of them fairly useless without the speaker audio/video.

The quality of a talk is probably inversely proportional to the "stand-alone-ability" of the slides. If you can get all the information from the slides they're way too dense. The best lecturers use the slides for pictures and as an outline, but deliver most of the information through speech.

I think slides should be useless without the speaker. If I don't need the speaker to understand the talk, then it was not a good talk.

And it gets especially annoying when those slides are rendered as a static PDF file. Lots of information gets repeated. It was especially ironic in the slides about Frames, Dictionaries and K-SVD, as they were talking about doing efficient and sparse representation of things.

I actually prefer slides in PDF form rather than .ppt/.pptx, as long as all the immediate transitions are omitted in the .pdf file. OpenOffice and LibreOffice have trouble rendering some .pptx files, and it's just less convenient than firing up a PDF reader

I'd rather have a list of book-recommendations.

"A one-day course and a set of PowerPoint slides are not enough to hope to cover all the material in any great depth. So Jim Van Verth and Lars Bishop wrote a book, with the help of our friends at Morgan Kaufmann:"

You aren't the only one who failed to see the connection between their slides and their book. It's a bit of a marketing blunder.

They should have put the book on the same page.

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