As with natural languages, most of the tools are poor, most of the methods are ineffective, and the books unreadable. Successful language learners gather quality resources and use proven references. The same applies to programming. Here I organize programming into four application areas with my recommended resources for each.
For some time I have fretted over which Asian language to learn. Japanese appeals to me for its sweet sound, and because I take interest in Japanese artwork (particularly the video games and animated films) that they have produced. However, I have rarely met Japanese-speaking people. Chinese is much more utilitarian. Just the sheer number of Chinese speakers and China's recent economic success ensures that any student of Chinese will have ample opportunity to practice. For this reason, I have chosen to study Chinese.
This rather simple physics problem is at the heart of any simulation involving rubbing parts.
Since reading about Lewis Carroll's game of Doublets in Pappas' Joy of Mathematics, I have loved the game and often thought about graphs (networks) in terms of Doublets. Here I present the basics of embeddings, and demonstrate using a genetic algorithm to optimize an embedding of a list of three-letter words from a few games of Doublets.
I've been playing around with the iPhone 4 since I took the plunge about two weeks ago. Amazing device. I really love the iTunes U feature. Access to countless hours of educational material. I've been falling asleep to The Tolkien Professor and the 99% Invisible podcast. The other day I took a long walk while listening to a lecture on the history of probability theory and found myself playing basketball (more vigorously than I'd expect). Why sit in a class, half-asleep, when you can listen to the same lecture while getting some cardio? As Steve Jobs would say, This is HUGE.
I've been reading Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. What I love most about the book is how my mind is just overflowing with genetic systems, simulatable quantitative machines; I'm just dying to code up some simulations of the systems he exposes so eloquently in the book. Every few pages, a new system comes into view. I have to pause, just stare into the void as my mind runs fast, imagining the mathematics needed to construct from the theory a working computer model.