Learn You a Haskell, for Great Good! is the same way. Wonder what's up with functional languages that leads them to do this.

Well, I suppose there's also why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby

>>Wonder what's up with functional languages that leads them to do this.

One way to teach dry math'y concepts is to make them fun to learn. Serious Math people mind find them irritating but for the remainder crowd it is a fun exercise.

Sure, though I suppose fun is in the eye of the beholder. Grokking Algorithms is illustrated with cartoons and examples that kids could understand, but it doesn't indulge in the same weird quirky whimsy that some of these texts do. It's almost as if they're written in some lost lolcat dialect.

It is not infantile, it is just a different way of approaching a problem. Instead of telling you what things are, they just ask you questions so that by answering them you discover the things yourself.

There is a big difference between two approaches. In the former you get facts as knowledge. In the latter your invent the knowledge yourself, and understand the processes, whys and hows you got there. The latter is a far better way because its hard to forget what you invented yourself.

Well I'm guessing you haven't read the book yet.

Basically all throughout the book(s), they authors use food names as variable, function names etc. It is indeed a nice idea because people do tend to associate good memories with delicious food. Especially if the food is greasy or sweet!

That quote This space is reserved for Jelly Bean stains is basically a filler sentence at the end of a chapter on a page, which happens to be high up in the page, the remainder of the page is basically empty, so they put it in as a joke.

This is not any different than the joke at the beginning of the 'Camel Book', Laziness, Impatience and Hubris, the three great virtues of a programmer.

You really should read those books, its one of those unique kinds of books that use a very innovative(albeit a very ancient) technique to teach you some very mind bending concepts. Its is possible that the approach will help you in understanding other things as well.

I'm not taking a position on whether or not the infantilism is appropriate, so whether or not I have read the book is neither here nor there.

The previous commenter characterised the text as needlessly infantile. It seemed clear enough to me that they were referring to the jokes about jelly bean stains. I am confused why you interpreted their challenge as being about some approach to problem solving.

> Its is possible that the approach will help you in understanding other things as well.

This is either such a general statement that it isn't worth saying, or it is direct condescension which I don't appreciate.

Whatever rocks your boat!

Feel free to not read those books! Works fine for me.

Yes, I was talking about the jelly bean stain stuff and the cartoons. I don’t see the point.

(I do also think the format of these books is pretentious and not actually that sound didactically, but that wasn’t what I was referring to when I said “infantilizing”.)

I've always seen a sense of humor as an essential component of problem solving. Stressy, serious, businesslike modes tend to get stuck in the weeds and miss the forest etc

This blog is such a classic for that.

http://computationaltales.blogspot.com

thanks for this! there's some good stuff in here. Kinda reminds me of master foo http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.ht...

It isn’t an essential part of problem solving. I think the fact that you think any technical material that isn’t humorous is automatically “stressy” may mostly say something about you… :\

For what it’s worth, I do have a sense of humor. Harvey Birdman is one of my favorite shows. The Sebben and Sebben employee orientation video is on another level.

I'm afraid I wasn't communicating effectively. I have no problem with non-humorous technical material - the parent comment asked

>How does the space reserved for jellybean stains guide the reader towards the desired problem-solving approach?

... and I was suggesting that perhaps the authors were using the medium as the message - I find that being relaxed helps with debugging, typically.

Seems like a false dichotomy to me. Authors can choose to write plainly and clearly.

The books are actually clearly written. They also have some humor in them. The horror.

Why are you directing this sarcastic comment towards me?

I've been saying and feeling this way for quite a while.

For example, someone wrote a book on Kafka streams for kids. It just dumb founded me that someone created it for that audience. The audacity to suggest that kids should learn about that/have something for them. It's a bit weird and doesn't teach lessons outside of the book material.

>>It's a bit weird and doesn't teach lessons outside of the book material.

Actually introducing some of these concepts in an abstract sense can help the kid appreciate subject at hand, and initiate them into more serious study.

Imagine telling a kid they could use a bunch of their friends and using map-reduce to count all the dogs in a park(send each to a section in the park, ask them to count the dogs[map], add all them at the end[reduce]).

Many of these concepts can get kids excited about STEM which is good!

Why is it good to get kids excited about STEM?

Well for a lot of reason. Firstly they pay better. Secondly, we want more and more kids especially women and marginalised communities to participate more in STEM. Giving them early exposure to things helps.

Also STEM education in general contains useful life skills to have. Having working knowledge of Math, and being able to reason rationally in general can help you in financial things later in life.

We aspire to have a populace with scientific temper.