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by j2kun 3493 days ago
When I look at Better Explained most of what I see is "a friendly guide to the logarithm" and "intuition for the law of cosines" (though Kalid does have some more advanced topics). I haven't seen his book so I can't comment on it.

My blog, on the other hand, tends to be more like "Here's an algorithm/theorem you can only find in research papers or graduate textbooks, proved, explained, and implemented." If you don't know proofs, most of my blog posts are too much too fast.

My book is trying to be in between the two. You have seen logarithms before and you know (or can look up) what similar triangles are. However, reading a typical math book is immediately too fast, the notation is too foreign, and the proofs seem to leave out a lot. My goal is to bring the reader in the fold w.r.t. notation and mindset and expectations (using programming analogies and leaning on the concepts you already understand well), showcase impressive applications in Python at the end of every chapter, and survey different areas of math relevant for software applications like machine learning and crypto.

I would be interested to know more about what specific topics you find difficult, maybe using Kalid's book as a reference?

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I should also mention that I don't expect every programmer to find career value out of the book. I like math, I hear from a lot of programmers who want to like math more (for fun or side projects or work), and I feel like I'm in a good position to help them.