How to Learn Persian - Mar 2025

Learning Tajiki Persian is faster and more eloquent!

Touring Older Persian Grammars - Feb 2025

Two hundred years of scholars and adventurers learned and taught Persian to yet more adventurers and scholars

History of Spanish Literacy - Dec 2024

How could Spain have only 30% literacy in 1900?

Lisp Curriculum - Sep 2024

Learn Scheme, Common Lisp ->maybe Clojure, with these books.

To Forge Deeper Thought - Jul 2024

The curiosity to bravely multisociate insights from all fields breeds innovation.

Deliberate Practice for Developers - Mar 2024

Athletes and fighters go to the gym, how do zen software monks work out?

WIP Math for Non-Mathematicians - Jan 2024

tl;dr: Mathematicians prefer to start with a structure’s most general form, while physicists prefer specific (applicable) cases.

The Pit of Expertise - Jan 2024

‘It depends.’ It depends? But everything depends! How does that help?!

REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon - Jan 2024 - John PSmith

Xenophon teaches us leadership.

How to Learn Go - May 2022

First Steps

• For new programmers:

  
  Alex Edwards' Let's Go and Let's Go Further teach core patterns, project structure and API development. They're the best introduction for a new programmer.
  
  
• For experienced programmers:

  • Tour of Go is the best place to get a feel for the language. A few hours at most.
  • Pick one:
    • Matt Holiday’s video course is in-depth and covers a lot of ground.
    • Learn Go with Tests
  • Effective Go

What’s next?

• Cloud Native Go - Titmus
• 100 Go Mistakes
• Style guides by Uber and Google
• Writing an Interpreter in Go & Writing a Compiler in Go - Thorsten Ball

Make a server, but not some demo thing, go all the way.

Who Wrote the TY Books? - Aug 2019

I have a copy of Teach Yourself Turkish, which was first published in 1919 (see page 4.) Rather perplexing, because the author G.L. Lewis was born in 1920. The publisher itself (English University Press) was founded in 1938. Intriguing. His obituary says he only discovered Turkish in 1939. Stranger still, Wikipedia gives 1953.

How to Learn Languages - May 2017

Here’s a rough sketch of my approach to language learning:

Good Language Books - Apr 2015

List of books