I’ve been building up my vimrc again because emacs’ tramp mode just wasn’t cutting it when it came to speed for my remote work environments.
I’ve been a vim user for around 4 years now and having read some books partially and sampling a lot of blogs and conference recordings over this span, I decided I should commit and formally invest into a definitive resource to get me upto speed and beyond.
I couldn’t have asked for a denser review of such a technical and diverse domain. It’d been more a year since I graduated (majored in computer science and minored in artificial intelligence) and so I decided to brush up on some basics and consolidate what I’d studying since the past ~4 years.
I also picked up the book to systematically populate my org-roam buffer and have my root node rooted here in the braindump.
Do note that this is an old post (from my last archived blog) that I’m refactoring : more on that here
I, hitherto, have been reading books as a single unit of intellectual conveyance. However, that strategy doesn’t work for all the works. Some authors have their writings crisply intertwined with their other writings.
Approaching a single book as a part of a larger intellectual conveyance is more efficient in the longer term if one intends to read all the work of a particular author. Consequently, grouping these reads together has also been somewhat interesting lately.
Books play a pivotal role in the life of any aspiring and existing intellectual. I began reading diversely and seriously when I was 19 and immediately regretted not starting sooner.
Reading sets you up for an involved existence. If you read vastly, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.
Over the span of 3 years (2019 - 2022), I read around a 100 books ranging from the classics, biographies, auto-biographies, physics, computer science, anthropology, data science, etymology, theology, game theory, mathematics, history, how-to-books, nutrition, physiology , fitness, health, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, business (okay, don’t judge - we all do this), economics, writing, self help (guilty as charged), spirituality, humor (guides to being funny and similar stuff), young adult (only 1 - please don’t chastise me - I could not handle the cringe), philosophy (a lot - please don’t chastise me) and meta books (speed reading, how to consume books, taking notes, etc).
I took this up when I had to setup a bunch of NLP pipelines for work and this does stand true to its name - it is a quick and practical index into approaches, introductory theory and useful libraries for the same.
I don’t like reading text books at a stretch due to several reasons:- “cross a bridge, when you get to it” is something that has stood the test of time for me when it comes to reading practical books. I don’t find it useful to read stuff without the doing if that is what the book is intended for.
Given I’ve passed through SICP once, quickly grasping common lisp to build stuff and explore the traditional and industrial aspects of lisp (I know clojure exists but traditional…) was my next objective: with decent speed and only solving the somewhat involved exercises, it took me two weeks to complete this book.
The exercises aren’t meant to be a challenge but to adapt to the environment and the topics introduced. The book does not explore concepts with depth (CLOS, macros, etc…) but that shouldn’t be the objective of an introduction anyway.
