It is becoming quite popular (or maybe it was always the case?) that someone learning some topic and at the same time writing a book about it. Interesting how it affects the quality of the content (versus books authored by persons with expertise in given topics).
I recently read a comment (I think it might have been on HN, but I can't find it) that said something like this: if you recently learned/mastered a topic, you're in a far better position to teach that topic than an expert, who's so deep into it, that they can't understand the beginners.
I wish I could find the source for this, because it was much better put, but that comment contains the gist of my motivation behind writing the book.
This is credible, but I'd guess that it'd be more accurately restated this way: if you recently learned/mastered a topic, you both have a fresh recall of the elements involved in reaching your level of mastery and what was involved in bridging that (personal) gap between unskilled ignorance and that mastery.
Whether that puts one in a far better position to teach than an expert probably depends on the expert. I definitely had math professors for whom the charge applied, and I'd speculate that an expert who's primarily focused on further mastery/development along the edges of the field might be someone who becomes less and less able to recall or relate to what it's like to take first steps into it. But on the other hand, I had math professors who clearly thought a lot about pedagogy as well as research, and practiced both at length... and I think someone who's spent significant time teaching beginners and reflecting on that as well as practicing their discipline and refining deep insights from that is likely in a better position to teach a topic than someone who just learned.
(And if you really want an optimal learning environment, put a class full of motivated learners in front of a teacher like that, and have them talk to each other. Hence the value of a good university course...)
The great benefit of experts over I-just-learned-this authors is that experts know how design x or feature y relates to other designs and features not implemented in the given project.
In other words, they know a lot more context and can tell whether something that appears totally normal in the project is actually done in an unusual way that has limitations, etc.
Completely agree. Currently reading a book authored by the creator of a framework and having a hard time of it. So many newbie questions. There is extra stuff I don't need to know as a beginner - put that in another book or another section. Don't interleave it with the basic material. There is stuff that make assumptions that I am an expert in the language, the code needs to be fully explained, line by line.
This applies to anything that we as human do, including doctors [0]. Younger doctors that are just out of a residency are more up to date about medical science and have the facts in a fresh memory.
> Younger doctors that are just out of a residency are more up to date about medical science and have the facts in a fresh memory.
Perhaps, but they often have not yet built up the muscle memory needed to manipulate instruments as skillfully as more experienced doctors, nor the knowledge needed to know how to handle unusual situations, both of which are particularly important for surgeons[0,1].
> if you recently learned/mastered a topic, you're in a far better position to teach that topic than an expert
That can work, assuming that (1) the particular difficulties you encountered will generalize to most other learners and that (2) being good at programming equates to being good at pedagogy.
>I recently read a comment (I think it might have been on HN, but I can't find it)
> if you recently learned/mastered a topic, you're in a far better position to teach that topic than an expert, who's so deep into it, that they can't understand the beginners.
Most experts I come across are generous when it comes to sharing what they know and their generosity may sometimes get in the way of a beginner's learning, but this is not always the case.
My subjective opinion is that a reader would learn more from a person that went to discover a new topic and wrote down the steps and knowledge acquired along the way. The reader is essentially taking the same steps, learning the same things. If however an expert would write about the same topic, she will have hard time to follow the same pattern.
I believe that J.K. Rowling used the same pattern for her Harry Potter books. She started writing them for children and then each book followed the same kids to their adulthood.
I think it's worse for the reader. Experience gives you "undocumented" knowledge - for example, knowledge of how system behaves under real load and what bottlenecks are and what are other limitations of particular architecture.
I think it's probably both, once you know a subject well it's easy to take some of that knowledge for granted. If you have just learnt it then you probably have a little more empathy for the reader.
I tend not to put those two "kinds" of books in same category. I read them with hope to achieve different goals. They aren't read in the same way, but I think that is normal considering those two types.
I believe it was always the case. I can remember books just like this in the 70's and 80's, teaching one how to write a Pascal interpreter in C, or then a GUI system in Turbo Pascal, for example, which felt very much like this kind of introduction/tutorial to both the language, and the application of the language itself to an interesting component. Is this a Go book or a Monkey/Interpreter book? Its neither, but both.
