Open-Juicer's comments

Eloquent Ruby is the design book to read.

Why not import some of HtDC best ideas to the Ruby world, for those of you think HtDC is Java biased? Actually, many good ruby books are adapted from the Java land.

A side note: To many rubyists' surprise, Matz is not a language-biased guy who would like to start a language war.

You'll learn Scheme going through SICP too.

From the author:

"It is a good idea to study the programming language that you use on a daily basis and to learn as much as possible about it. We strongly believe, however, that it is a bad idea to teach the details of any programming language in a course. Nobody can predict which programming language you will use.

Therefore, time in a course is better spent on studying the general principles of program design rather than the arcane principles of any given programming language."

This book takes a theoretical approach to OOP.

As the author said, this book is NOT about Java. Similarly, SICP is NOT about Scheme.

Interestingly, It's the same author who teaches how to design programs with Racket, a lisp dialect.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/index.html

>(9) Haskell Eats Circular Definitions for Breakfast

It's recursive, not circular, definition. A circular definition never ends while a recursive one does.

Chinese words being displayed incorrectly is based on a false assumption.

On Twitter, 140 Characters mean a lot in Chinese! why? In Chinese, almost every character is a word; In English, every character is just an alphabet, not a word, with minor exceptions of course. Chinese words are square blocks whereas English ones rectangle blocks. They shouldn't be of the same height.

I would argue that Chinese words convey more meaning per cm square. The same square space occupied by 5 rectangle capital alphabets is more than enough to display any Chinese character correctly.

BTW, you don't need to recognize every stroke to be able to identify a Chinese word. You can tell by its pictorial pattern, such as negative spaces.

>>>So, in an effort to boost literacy, the People's Republic of China attempted to make learning characters easier through a series of simplification rounds that took place between the 1950s and 1970s<<<

The fact is that people in Hong Kong and Taiwan have a much higher literacy rate than those in mainland China, yet they use Traditional Chinese. Mainlanders' low literacy rate is mainly a sign of lacking education, not Traditional Chinese being a barrier to literacy. Moreover, in a digital world, they make no difference in input speed.

What Hong-Kongers and Taiwanese are opposing to is not the communist simplifying Chinese Characters, but simplifying them in an ugly fashion. In most cases, it breaks the consistency in word formation as seen in Traditional Chinese. In other cases, it's not aesthetic and even absurd. There is a joke saying that the word factory(廠)in simplified Chinese (厂) explains why factories in mainland China are subject to collapse.

Speaking of economics, simplified Chinese indeed appeals to larger potential customers. However, PRC put lots of restrictions on foreign corporations. That's why even Google and Facebook failed to (and will continue to) dominate in China. On the other side, Hong Kong and Taiwan have the goodies of free markets.

I've got lots of good math books to recommend. However, giving beginners too much information would make them more confused.

So, only two recommendations for you, one book, one website:

1) If I'm only allowed to recommend one math book to beginners, It'll definitely be:

What is Mathematics - by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins

Take a look at the review by Albert Einstein. Yes, Albert Einstein!

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Ideas-...

2)BetterExplained

This site explains math intuitively unlike the traditional formal approach.

http://betterexplained.com/archives/