web VS learnxinyminutes-docs

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; likewise it's not possible to accept money without involving a 3rd party service like Fractured Atlas or Stripe or PayPal. (Moving away from GitHub towards a self-hosted Git solution is actually on our long-term todo list[1]).

All those things doesn't mean you can't run your web app on a single tiny server, and that outsourcing the basic underpinnings of your web app, like the OS, runtime, and database to some cloud service, or that resorting to flavor-of-the-month frameworks or containers, will result in complexity and bloat.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/web/blob/master/README.md#...

Hey a little later to the party here but I'm really enjoying this. I started reading a book with it and while I agree with others it's not great for grammar it certainly shows me many new words without requiring me to read at a glacial pace.

PS: You should def try to include some books from https://standardebooks.org/ which are much nicer formatted than the ones you're using from Project Gutenberg.

Good luck and I hope you can keep building this out. Already the update to tap anywhere to close the word definition is a nice improvement :)

A number of e-book platforms are discussed on my blog, which dives deeply into the technical nuances of typesetting a few[1]. Ultimately, I typeset a classic from Standard EBooks[2], Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde[3].

[1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

[2]: https://standardebooks.org/

[3]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

As an aside, for anyone looking for free classic books to read on their various eReaders, these are very well done: https://standardebooks.org

It is the same when you download a kepub book from standardebooks.org. You will have the epub file with kepub features.

> https://standardebooks.org/

Standard Ebooks is seriously impressive. One of my favorite sources of books in the public domain.

I’d also add in addition to this excellent list of DRM-free ebooks, it’s always worth looking into borrowing a book from the library via Libby/Overdrive.

> Sure, maybe for some esoteric edge cases, but 5 mins on https://learnxinyminutes.com/ should get you 80% of the way there, and an afternoon looking at big projects or guidelines/examples should you another 18% of the way.

Not for C++, and even for other languages, it's not the language that's hard, it's the idioms.

Python written by experts can be well-nigh incomprehensible (you can save typing out exactly one line if you use list-comprehensions everywhere!).

Someone who knows Javascript well still needs to know all the nooks and crannies of the popular frameworks.

Java with the most popular frameworks (Spring/Boot/etc) can be impossible for a non-Java programmer to reason about (where's all this fucking magic coming from? Where is it documented? What are the other magic words I can put into comments?)

C# is turning into a C++ wannabe as far as comprehension complexity goes.

Right now, the quickest onboarding I've seen by far are Go codebases.

The knowledge tree required to contribute to a codebase can exists on a Deep axis and a Wide axis. C++ goes Deep and Wide. Go and C are the only projects I've seen that goes neither deep nor wide.

Learn x in y minutes: Concise tutorials to learn various programming languages and tools quickly.

StackOverflow's making their own competing LLM for all this stuff.

IMO, one of the biggest problems with the way people use LLMs right now, is that they're being treated as a single oracle: to know Java, it must be trained on examples of Java.

It would be much better if their language comprehension abilities were kept separated from their knowledge (and there are development efforts in this direction), so in this example it would be trained to be able to be able to read a Java tutorial rather than by actually reading a Java tutorial, so when the overall system is asked to write something in Java, the language model within the system decides to do this by opening https://learnxinyminutes.com and combining the user query with the webpage.

I think this will help make the models more compact, which is a benefit all by itself, but it would also mean that knowledge can be updated much more easily.

Someone would have to actually do this in order to see if those benefits are worth the extra cost of having to load a potentially huge a tutorial into the context window, and likewise the extent to which a more compact training set makes the language comprehension worse.

The project was created and is maintained by Adam Bard, but is open sourced with over 1.7k contributors since 2013

https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes-docs

So you have studied programming for at least 5 years, what kinds of programs have you written? Apparently you have already applied your skills, since you have "created a good reputation among developers"? Why a time-frame of 20 years, why not 20 months or 20 weeks? Heck, you can learn a lot in even 20 days!

Once you have learned a few languages, libraries and frameworks then learning new stuff becomes much easier. At that point I'd recommend to check the website https://learnxinyminutes.com. Meanwhile, continue asking questions here and elsewhere :)

An other tip, if you are into computer science and algorithms stuff I recommend you try to solve problems which are posted at https://codegolf.stackexchange.com. You don't need to try solving them in less than X characters, but just to get them solved by any means necessary. And don't take too much bad influence from the posted solutions.

If you want a brief overview, go to https://learnxinyminutes.com/ and look for Javascript. I guess it should be roughly the time it took to learn C++ or possibly less, but JS has its own quirks. Often learning a second language is difficult as the first.

Very light compared to the other resources people have linked for you, but I love https://learnxinyminutes.com/