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by SuboptimalEng 661 days ago
Logged in to comment this. Very much agree. It's crazy (to me) that books like this gets so much hype on HN when there are much better videos that explain these topics better.

Most of my math learning starting in high school all the way through undergrad was done by watching YouTube videos. I used books to practice problems, but when it came to understanding topics more deeply, it was always some random person on YouTube who did it better.

I hope in the future, all math (at least applied math) is explained using nice visualizations + videos instead of books like this.

2 comments

The same thing applies to computer science. Try figuring out even the basics, like merge or quick sort, using pseudocode in a traditional algorithms book. It's an extremely difficult and time consuming nightmare. But watch a video of how merge or quick sort works, then you gain geniune understanding within minutes.
Surprisingly one of the best summaries (~10 pages) to applied linear algebra I've found is in Nielsen and Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information.

Presented primarily without proofs which whilst argubably can be limiting isn't relevant, at least for what their goal is.