✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

What to learn

danluu.com · 4,183 words · saved by 1 readers

It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler problems everywhere and will recognize all of the cases where people are solving a compiler problem without using compiler knowledge. Instead of hacking together some half-baked solution that will never work, you can apply a bit of computer science knowledge to solve the problem in a better way with less effort. That's not untrue, but it's also not a reason to study compilers in particular because you can say that about many different areas of computer science and math. Queuing theory, computer architecture, mathematical optimization, operations research, etc.

What to learn It's common to see people advocate for learning skills that they have or using processes that they use. For example, Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler problems everywhere and will recognize all of the cases where people are solving a compiler problem without using compiler knowledge. Instead of hacking together some half-baked solution that will never work, you can apply a bit of computer science knowledge to solve the proble

Explore this link on the map →

related reading