This is a good resource BUT nothing compared with the interactivity that having someone with decades of experience in the industry gives you.
At a University you have a constant feedback loop of your knowledge being evaluated by people with experience.
A good teacher can give you this global view of a subset of what is really important very fast, so you follow Pareto's principle, you use it,you get more interested,you get deeper. This way you become continuously engaged.
Imagine you want to read "Structure an interpretation of computer programs". It is a jewel book, but if you read it you will not understand 95% of it, or what this academic stuff has anything to do with the real world.
You need someone with experience that tells you: You spent three weeks making this project, let's make it in two hours with this technology.
Of course it has taken years for this person to do in two hours what takes you weeks of work, and it will take you also years to be able to do that on the same level.
BUT if you read the most important content of this book, study and apply it over a week, you will be able to reduce the work from three weeks to a single week with one week of effort.
With a small effort you can get great rewards. That is pareto's Principle.
But you can not study only the most important principles of a book if you don't really know what is important and what is not. That is what a master knows.
Imagine that you study English as a foreign student by a book and you study words like "persistence" or "clairvoyance" at the same time you study "make","do", "he" or "she".
Worse, imagine that you study all the words but you don't study how they sound, so you make an idea in your head of the sound of the words based on your native language. Now every new word you learn, you learn it with the wrong sound.
You need someone telling you: Stop reading the book and do this and then you will understand what the book says, then follow this other part of the book.
Having a mentor or master of course is expensive, and that is the reason Universities exist, so masters could be shared and prices go down.
If you dot have direct access to a master, I recommend that you follow lectures of masters before you read X book.
I appreciate this example. I have witnessed a situation where a monk from Thailand was learning english by reading words pronouncing them how he imagined them to be in his own dialect. Nobody could understand the lectures he was leading about inner peace and presence.
On the find masters before reading the book: It's a difficult chore to do if you're not in a university I guess - you would need to have a really skilled colleague helping you out otherwise.
Either way, by reading summaries of the books written by other people could give a great insights of what others found the best that you could apply to your own.
Plus, in a University setting you get classmates, this allows you to evaluate yourself against your peers. When I was in Uni for my CS, I often thought that I am dumb because I was struggling with homework assignments. Later in class I would end up doing exceptionally well on quizes/tests. This was my aha moment. Now, I know most struggle with CS concepts, algorithms, data structures at some point and we all struggle at work, have to google and so on.
It is important to know because I often felt like maybe I was wasting my time. This stupid thing took 3 hours.
Comments
This is a good resource BUT nothing compared with the interactivity that having someone with decades of experience in the industry gives you.
At a University you have a constant feedback loop of your knowledge being evaluated by people with experience.
A good teacher can give you this global view of a subset of what is really important very fast, so you follow Pareto's principle, you use it,you get more interested,you get deeper. This way you become continuously engaged.
Imagine you want to read "Structure an interpretation of computer programs". It is a jewel book, but if you read it you will not understand 95% of it, or what this academic stuff has anything to do with the real world.
You need someone with experience that tells you: You spent three weeks making this project, let's make it in two hours with this technology.
Of course it has taken years for this person to do in two hours what takes you weeks of work, and it will take you also years to be able to do that on the same level.
BUT if you read the most important content of this book, study and apply it over a week, you will be able to reduce the work from three weeks to a single week with one week of effort.
With a small effort you can get great rewards. That is pareto's Principle.
But you can not study only the most important principles of a book if you don't really know what is important and what is not. That is what a master knows.
Imagine that you study English as a foreign student by a book and you study words like "persistence" or "clairvoyance" at the same time you study "make","do", "he" or "she".
Worse, imagine that you study all the words but you don't study how they sound, so you make an idea in your head of the sound of the words based on your native language. Now every new word you learn, you learn it with the wrong sound.
You need someone telling you: Stop reading the book and do this and then you will understand what the book says, then follow this other part of the book.
Having a mentor or master of course is expensive, and that is the reason Universities exist, so masters could be shared and prices go down.
If you dot have direct access to a master, I recommend that you follow lectures of masters before you read X book.
I appreciate this example. I have witnessed a situation where a monk from Thailand was learning english by reading words pronouncing them how he imagined them to be in his own dialect. Nobody could understand the lectures he was leading about inner peace and presence.
On the find masters before reading the book: It's a difficult chore to do if you're not in a university I guess - you would need to have a really skilled colleague helping you out otherwise.
Either way, by reading summaries of the books written by other people could give a great insights of what others found the best that you could apply to your own.
Plus, in a University setting you get classmates, this allows you to evaluate yourself against your peers. When I was in Uni for my CS, I often thought that I am dumb because I was struggling with homework assignments. Later in class I would end up doing exceptionally well on quizes/tests. This was my aha moment. Now, I know most struggle with CS concepts, algorithms, data structures at some point and we all struggle at work, have to google and so on.
It is important to know because I often felt like maybe I was wasting my time. This stupid thing took 3 hours.