from Hacker News

You're not dumb, the prerequisites are bullshit

by markozivanovic on 1/22/22, 10:31 AM with 52 comments

• by rossvor on 1/22/22, 11:48 AM

  In my experience the parts of a (study) book where you feel dumb and frustrated while reading are generally the best parts. That's where you get the most worth out of it, it means you finally hit the spot where you are learning new stuff and concepts, rather than re-hashing what you already knew or thought about, just from a slightly different perspective (which is also useful, but not as much).

• by lnxg33k1 on 1/22/22, 12:15 PM

  Meh, I usually just ignore the stuff about famous people reviews on the book, the formatting and the prerequisites, when I am interested about a topic, I get the book, don't understand something, research about it with the help of other resources, I am more likely to use a book as a starting point to incrementally learn something in order, more than the only source of truth, so I get on internet often while reading

  Since we're at it, I hate the fact that books have started being sold like apples by weight and based on the amount of pages, so that it's like I feel during the past few years I've had insanely long books repeating the same shit over and over with authors without any capability to express a concept directly and just walking around a point with low expression skills. I think writing a book right now has become more of a PR exercise for people, rather than something being done by people who have actually learned how to write

  Sometimes I just find myself in the middle of a page talking with a book, thinking "Wtf mate you just fcking said that, can you just get to the fcking point already?"

• by nyellin on 1/22/22, 11:57 AM

  I take a different approach in technical materials I write. I want to make system internals accessible to more people, not to a restricted few who have the right prior knowledge.

  I try to write something that everyone understands who has a minimal relevant background (i.e. everyone who would be interested in reading the post) but include links to deeper materials or kernel source code so that everyone can learn from it.

  Here's an example with an article I wrote on Linux shebangs: https://natanyellin.com/posts/shebang-python-bad-interpreter...

  Would love to hear constructive criticism on how I can improve!

• by peey on 1/22/22, 11:59 AM

  It's useful to know who they think the book is written for, to get the most out of the book.

  Books are not individualized, so it's a very difficult ask to publishers and writers to write something in that section that perfectly applies to you.

• by Jensson on 1/22/22, 11:57 AM

  > Authors (actually publishers) use that chapter to list the skills you should have to keep up with the book contents. More often than not, it’s misleading, downplays the expertise you need to have, and it sets the bar unrealistically low.

  Realistically a student will spend a semester reading the book while also following instructions about the content of the book, and they still have difficulties. That is the amount of work you have to do if you have the correct prerequisites. So likely you just have unrealistic expectations how fast you'd be able to read a technical book covering a field you aren't used to.

• by gdjdkslslp on 1/22/22, 12:18 PM

  A lot of math textbooks are like this and people’s perception around them.

  To be fair Axler’s linear algebra book states it’s for a second semester course in linear algebra but many math people recommend it as a first exposure to the subject to someone that doesn’t know any linear algebra anyway. Technically the only prerequisite is an exposure to proofs and mathematical thinking.

  But the book doesn’t like determinants and isn’t focused on computing things around matrices and is instead focused on finite dimensional vector spaces and so on.

  To someone that doesn’t even know what a matrix is but have seen some basic proofs it’d be hard for them to pick up and understand Axler in its fullest depth despite the prerequisites just being “math maturity”. Axler assumes you know a lot more than he writes, or assumes you’ll figure it quickly.

  Same can be said for Rudin’s basic analysis book. Technically anyone can pick it up and go through it with minimum pre-reqs. But without a tutor or someone to answer questions most beginners would get stuck somewhere.

  Also it’s a thing these books don’t tend to include any solutions so without someone checking your work or a proof assistant then most beginners wouldn’t have a clue if their proofs are valid or contain a subtle mistake or would think they’re valid but be incorrect.

• by l0gin on 1/22/22, 2:57 PM

  > Authors (actually publishers) use that chapter to list the skills you should have to keep up with the book contents. More often than not, it’s misleading, downplays the expertise you need to have, and it sets the bar unrealistically low.

  Opposite is often true for math textbooks. The authors of such texts overhedge unnecessarily, imo.

  Open a textbook on, say, differential geometry. The prerequisite are: at least one course of real analysis, facility with linear algebra, knowledge of general topology, some familiarity with complex analysis, bla bla bla. If you are anything like me, upon learning about these prereqs you run off to learn all the ins and outs of nets and filters in topology and end up having studied and finished a textbook on functional analysis. When in reality all that was required for profitable reading of the original textbook on diff. geometry was ability to multiply two matrices together and not up and run in fear when coming across a phrase like "...by compactness argument".

• by kthejoker2 on 1/24/22, 10:07 AM

  Required reading for anyone intending to share their expertise with an audience

  https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html

  Kathy Sierra also talks about deliberate practice as working at the "edge of your circle of competency", which can be hard to gauge when working with new topics or material (is this statistical method just a variation on a theme I know well or underpinned by several topics I know nothing about)

  As someone who is:

  * a sought out expert in a few things

  * very sympathetic to "the noob" and learning anxiety

  * a "noob" himself in most things

  I find that reducing anxiety is more important than the actual material. Prerequisites lists by definition increase anxiety. Much better to simply give a "refresher" of examples of the "circle of competency" you're targeting, and let the reader decide if it's their "edge" or not.

• by Scarblac on 1/22/22, 11:52 AM

  Some examples would help. Without them I can't say this is something I recognize.

• by PicassoCTs on 1/22/22, 12:29 PM

  That feeling of stupidity usually sets in, when there is no good explanation, using non field-specific jargon. If somebody explains to you a fact, using not yet-explained concepts or words, you are hitting a recursive problem and can not continue.

  The best explanations do not use field jargon and that is the reason why they are so rare.

  If your beginners book uses field jargon without laymans explanations directly beside it, it is simply a bad beginners book. Bonus-points if you use field jargon from other fields not even related to the topic of the book.

• by k__ on 1/22/22, 12:24 PM

  I think, the main issue is, most people don't write for an audience, they write to write.

  I reviewed a bunch of technical books from a big publisher, and they were overwhelmingly bad.

  Some of the authors have written like 8 books about AWS or K8s and still their books didn't reflect that they gained any experience in writing.

  But yeah, it's obviously a good career move to write a book. If you're a published author for 5 K8s books, you have to have some skills, right?

• by oefrha on 1/22/22, 12:10 PM

  Alternatively, a good technical book should challenge you and it’s totally fine to only take away some percentage of it. If the whole book feels like “happily breeze through the first few chapters, and I would get that nice rush you get when you learn new stuff”, you’re most likely just wasting your time learning hardly anything substantial, since substantial learning usually isn’t a breeze.

• by drdunce on 1/22/22, 2:38 PM

  I believe the point at which the author leaps from a clear and beautiful worded explanation into deep complexity without accompanying explanation is the point at which they no longer fully understand it themselves.

  Having attended many a conference and spoken to many an author, the deep bit of maths in their publication without any understanding is most often the bit you later find they copy and pasted.

• by nathias on 1/22/22, 12:48 PM

  You are dumb and the prerequisites are dumb. Stupidity is universal and we must struggle against it each moment of our lives or drown in it.

• by chobytes on 1/22/22, 12:01 PM

  its hard to know what the prereqs are when you already know a thing deeply. people wont even agree about what it means to understand the prereqs!

• by swayson on 1/22/22, 11:57 AM

  Refreshing take!

• by NikolaeVarius on 1/22/22, 12:09 PM

  I find its healthier to assume you're dumb if you don't understand what is going on in the textbook. Its incentive to get better.

  Everyone is an idiot at something.