Learning 📚

Learning

She said:

I once got the advice to read Pro Git in this chapter order: 10, then 1–9. As opposed to 1–10.

I can see how that might work. But I'm too lazy to read a whole book to find out how to use soure control because I came to git simply as another replacement for the (many) previous source control things. Conceptually, though, I was reading from chapter 1, but pretty soon with git I found myself thinking "that can't possibly work" and having to find out some of the chapter 10 stuff. So... I want to read both ends??

I think there may be a pre-book stage that's important but often ignored. I knew what git was before I used it, but often that's not the case. For example, today I saw a mention of Jupyter notebooks. The Wikipedia page starts off by talking about how to pronounce it, how it's related to some other projects, how it pays homage to Galileo, and...

[Jupyter] is a community run project with a goal to "develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages"

That's all great, but I still have no idea what I could do with it. What's it for? The project web site is no more helpful.

So I suggest that the pre-book stage is:

• Here's an example of Thing (whatever that is) doing its canoncial thing. "You can sit in this metal box with wheels and it can take you from one place to another."
• OK, now you've got some context, here's chapter 1, "Safety precautions before starting the car"
• If you like to know how things work, here's chapter 10, "Suck, squeeze, bang, blow"

If you ever have to document something, don't miss out the pre-book stage.