Hacker News Books

Euclid's Elements was a pretty foundational text. Also Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica

You're writing as if this wasn't basically the foundation of modern writing instruction, or literally the most memorable quote from Elements of Style.

"Everybody Writes"
Not that I follow all the great advice yet but I aspire to get there someday. I have it on my shelf next to "Elements of Style."

Betterexplained.com has many very good intuitive explanations of mathematical concepts. Elements by the publishers of Dragonbox will give you reasonable intuition for geometry. If you just want to use calculus Silvanus P. Thom(p?)son's Calculus Made Easy is excellent. Linear Algebra Done Right and LAD Wrong are both good books. LADW is free, legally.

The Art of Problem Solving series of books are uniformly excellent.

This echoes much of the theme of Strunk & White "Elements of Style": write concisely and directly.

Euclid's Elements teaches geometric concepts that you're probably familiar with, but with interesting proofs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_Elements

It's free, it's time tested, and probably just the right amount of rigor to get your proof abilities up. I think the ability to prove theorems and the ability to construct abstractions go hand-in-hand.

At some point in time, there was this guy called 'Euclid'. He was a mathematician, of sorts. So he wrote a book called "Elements". Pretty famous book. There were tons of Geometry. The kind of Geometry you could build temples for kings, find the shortest road or just show-off your math skills by proving that prime numbers are infinite(!).

Since the book was so famous and deemed important, the Farao tried to read the book. But it was a difficult book. He had to go back and forth more than twice. He was struggling to understand the first chapters. Eveything was so complicaed and soon he got bored to death. So being a Farao (a God among humans) summoned Euclid and asked if there was a shorter path to learning geometry than reading the book. Euclid turned to the royalty and replied: "There is no royal road to geometry."

So, that's the problem: There's no royal road to programming. You have to put the in the hours and patience. If you're really going to do this, stop pressing your self to learn fast. Just choose a language, buy an introductory book and jump in.

I agree that there are mathematicians with this viewpoint.

However, I argue that this viewpoint is obsolete and should no longer be acceptable. Sure, it's great if a proof can be clearly understood completely by human. But humans are frighteningly limited creatures. Humans struggle to understand some things, and make mistakes all the time. Euclid's Elements was one of the most popular books of all time, and no one noticed an omission of an axiom for over two thousand years. Mathematicians are smart people, but they are merely people. They make mistakes all the time. Even published papers have had many mistakes found in them.

If the goal is to make up stories and communicate them, then sure, there's no need for computer verification. But that sounds like a fiction writer. I don't think that describes mathematics adequately. Science and engineering all depend on mathematics, and for that to work well, mathematics has to be rigorously correct.

If the goal is for absolute certainty that certain claims are true given certain assumptions, then we need to move beyond the traditional manual methods of verification. Mathematics has gotten too complex for that to work anymore with a reasonable level of confidence. It will be challenging and take time, but so are many other important endeavors.

Is mathematics about truth, or about something else? In many ways this discussion is basically an argument about what is mathematics. You can see where I land on that question. I think truth should be the goal.

Byrne's Elements is pretty remarkable. It's an interesting juxtaposition of old 19th century typesetting (complete with initials) and comparatively "modern" graphic design. Some pages look like they could be right out of De Stijl.

Archive.org hosts a nice PDF copy, which I find more convenient than the jpegs:
https://archive.org/details/firstsixbooksofe00byrn

I learnt a good bit of C++ by going through Elements of Programming Interviews, trawling through cppreference.com and getting help from #C++ on FreeNode for the difficult parts. Coming from mainly functional languages, I actually found it quite fun going through cppreference.com and seeing all the interesting ways in which C++ does things. Especially the STL.

Pick an interesting project and continue in that vein. The biggest difficulty for me was understanding the memory model and all the different types of value, references and so on, but #C++ was again a brilliant resource for smart pointers to good articles on the difficult subjects.

Professional C++ programmers might have other opinions on how best to learn.

You have that backwards. White wrote all of "Charlotte's Web" and much of "Elements of Style".

> You have to get over yourself about the tools not being elegant

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/07/11/a-bad-workman-blam...

Jokes aside, the history of mathematics is a pretty worthwhile subject to study to truly appreciate the importance and implications of tools (or mathematical discoveries in this case). There's a reason why it took humans 2000 years after Euclid first wrote his 'Elements' to discover non-euclidean geometry...

Elements of Style is not authoritative. Widely cited, widely praised, widely criticized.

Find an author you enjoy, subject their work to an analysis strictly driven by Elements of Style, and you'll find they fail to measure up. Even if the book in question is Charlotte's Web, by the way.

I'm not saying the book has no value, but it's far from authoritative.

Almost finished Vol I of Feynman Lectures On Physics. So far, Im picking up on the same enthusiasm and joy. A real pleasure to read.

Euclid's Elements too for geometry is fantastic. (I think reading "from the horses mouth" is necessary but not sufficient. With guys like Newton especially, since there are no translation barriers (for us English speakers), and they are quite relatable.)

I have noticed that excursions? in history of a topic; its people, places, culture, enhance the quality of the book. Feynman goes on historical asides, as does say, Apostol (in his calculus texts), and it has been a while but I believe SICP does too. I think the teaching of something should be coupled with its history.

In this same vein, I'm too am interested in a book covering evolution and biology, but I have not found one, or heard of one, so if anybody knows I would greatly appreciate it. Two good bio books I have read are The Selfish Gene, and The Machinery Of Life (Goodsell), but they're more auxiliary.

Some suggestions:
1) Use active voice where possible
2) As someone already mentioned, try the suggestions from "Elements of Style"
3) Have someone read it and tell you what they think you're trying to say

Writing well is hard. You should struggle to write well. The fact that just about everyone can write makes it even harder.

Elements of Information Theory - Cover, Thomas

Network Information Theory - El Gamal, Kim

Adaptive Wireless Communications - Bliss, Govindasamy

Wireless Communications - Goldsmith

Focusing on mathematics, I think about two kinds of foundational books.

1. Historically foundational: books that brought important ideas, introduced a new branch, progressed the maths significantly. You can read them these days, but their content, proofs, language, etc. is not up to date. Examples: Elements by Euclid, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Newton, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae by Gauss.

2. Modern foundational books: The ones that can be used for studying now. Books that are clearly written, popular, cover their subject well. Examples: Visual Complex Analysis, Spivak’s Calculus, Linear Algebra Done Right, Hardy’s
An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers.

My main profession has been a writer...and since joining HN, I've probably written 10x more words on these comment boards than for any other forum or published medium. I can't say that I'm actively trying to practice...but discussion here is (usually) so enjoyable that it's easy to get in the habit...just like playing recreational soccer for fun can often be a better way to get in shape than a dedicated running regimen.

If English and writing is not something you've been able to devote yourself to, I would recommend something in addition to frequent commenting: pick up a copy of "The Elements of Style" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style) and as you write comments on HN (or blog posts)...pick a rule in Elements of Style and focus on the technique mentioned. For example, rule 12, Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.

e.g. "He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward" versus "He grinned as he pocketed the coin".

Look over your comment and revise it according to the technique. Rinse, repeat, etc.

Elements of Style is an old book, but I still find it to be great advice. I've thought about making such a book for programming in a high level language (I know such a book exists for C/C++)...because good style can really influence good function.

Also, assuming that you're using a throwaway profile for this comment, make a profile with your real name and identity. This has been discussed on HN before, but being accountable to your identity is a nice push to make you even more attentive to your quality of writing.

Eh, they certainly tend to avoid fluff, and by definition, until you get to Marx, James, Freud you're not going to find "pop psychology"! A lot of them are very much worth reading, I personally would recommend:

Homer and a few Greek plays

Sample a bit of the great story teller Herodotus, then read the birth of historiography in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, which by itself is also very interesting and important (wonder why the Founder of the US didn't like direct democracy? There are very important object lessons in it).

Surely Plato and Aristotle deserve some attention! The contents of the latter's Rhetoric is essential for when you can't reach people with dialectic.

Euclid's Elements is still about as good as you can get for what it teaches.

Plutarch is great, but I really like that period of history. To it I would add reading some of the earlier bits of Livy.

Read, or better yet listen to audio of a few of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, out loud you can follow their Middle English.

Machiavelli's The Prince is still damned good, and a landmark in talking about politics as it is, not as how people would like it to be.

Shakespeare surely needs some attention by English speakers. Swift's Gulliver's Travels were amusing when I read them in their original, and obviously very influential.

So, yeah, check out some of the classics.

Thank you for the links. Elements of Software Construction courses on edX

https://www.edx.org/course/software-construction-java-mitx-6...

https://www.edx.org/course/advanced-software-construction-ja...

I tend to agree with Geoff Pullum: http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549... when it comes to Elements of Style.

Have you tried some of the better math related apps?

Like DragonBox's Elements, Algebra and Numbers [1]?
Or the ones by DuckDuckMoose, such as MooseMath [2]?
KhanAcademy's very first levels might be good as well [3].

With your oldest you might try a game like Junior Catan [4], that than graduates to Catan where you can talk about the probability distribution of the sum of two dice, an essential aspect of Catan.

You could perhaps try a programming language like Scratch. Have a go at some of code.org's "games" [5] and perhaps even MIT app inventor's with your oldest? [6]

[1] https://dragonbox.com/

[2] http://www.duckduckmoose.com/educational-iphone-itouch-apps-...

[3] https://www.khanacademy.org/math/early-math

[4] https://www.catan.com/game/catan-junior

[5] https://code.org/minecraft

[6] http://www.appinventor.org/content/ai2apps/simpleApps/androi...

+1 for Sense of Style. I found Elements of Style to be very strict. The grammatical rules were portrayed as black/white so you are either correct in its use or you are wrong. I also felt that the guidelines somewhat do not apply to contemporary modes of communication for example email, IM, a casual note.
Sense of style was very forgiving in grammar. The focus was on getting the message communicated. This, has helped me immensely as somebody who learned English as secondary language in school.
Haven't had chance to gift it but highly recommended.

The list shows both Leonardo's dilettantism in Latin and mathematics, and how printing changed the way we learn. Even in 1490, to learn "how to square a triangle", you did not have to get the master of arithmetic to show you. You could find a copy of Euclid's Elements and skim it up to Proposition II.14 [1]. The first printed edition of Elements (in Latin) was published in 1482 [2].

[1] https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/elements/bookII/propII14.h...
[2] https://archive.org/details/preclarissimusli00eucl

I'm not sure if you care for death metal, but Allegaeon released Elements of the Infinite last year which contains several songs about cosmology and mathematics. One, in particular, is entitled "Dyson Sphere"[1].

While we're on the subject of Dyson Spheres, Alkaloid released a four part song earlier this year on their debut, again entitled "Dyson Sphere". My interpretation is that it's about a sphere created in order to serve as an incubator for an entire species. All of the parts are available on their Bandcamp page[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVGcwoqgbyE
[2] https://alkaloid-band.bandcamp.com/album/the-malkuth-grimoir...

I found this article more informative than Elements of Style. Elements of Style is full of poorly thought out grammatical "rules" which are flat out incorrect, or over-generalizations without much guidance on how to properly apply them, and even the authors of Elements of Style don't actually follow most of their own "rules." If you actually tried following Strunk and White's rules, your writing would come out sounding bizarre and stilted.

Elements of Programming seems to be approaching the limits of advanced programming techniques. It has the reputation of being mathematically rigorous. What else can you study at that point regarding the mathematics of programming? My concern is that software engineering will be slow to graduate into a science, and we will be stuck as merely an artform for the foreseeable future.

Uhm, what? You couldn't be more off. Traditionally, any liberal arts education would include extensive familiarity with the classics. That means Plato & Dante, at the minimum, whether a BA or BS. You were expected to know Latin and Greek because you were expected to read Latin and Greek. If you were pursuing a BS, then perhaps you would read Euclid's "Elements" instead of Thucydides' "The History of the Peloponnesian War". (&c., It's not like those were the only texts one would encounter.) But languages were a prerequisite because they lacked the chronological hubris of our age. Hence the tight coupling with Geography: notice the ties between Xenophon in translation & the role of the Ten Thousand in Geography.