Stats for nerds
4recommend
6mentions
5people
2009–2015years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Meditations - Marcus Aurelius -- A fine classic I enjoyed.
Might count, might not, since it finished in March but was going on before. I loved Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Eliezer Yudkowsky - http://hpmor.com/
Loved Masters of Doom - David Kushner
I liked Worm - Wildbow - https://parahumans.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/ -- but it falls short of overall greatness and I don't think it's worth its 22-average-books length if I were to go back in time and decide on rereading...
Learn to Play Go: A Master's Guide to the Ultimate Game (Volume I) - Janice Kim -- I've been learning Go and thought this book was particularly excellent for beginners.
There are at least 4 other books I'm close to finishing and I might get one done before the end of the month... Volume 2 of the above Go series, Mythical Man-Month, A handbook of traditional living, or The Waking Dream.
- Check out Sensei's Library Go wiki, Nick Sibicky on YouTube, and Janice Kim's "Learn to Play Go" series of books, IMO.
Also, the "Hikaro no Go" anime series is absolutely wonderful, and that takes Hikaro from a young and completely new to Go kid through to being a professional, with short instructional videos for kids after each episode.
- As another beginner (still <50 19x19 games, so take with salt) I really appreciated the style and content in Janice Kim's Learn to Play Go series' first book. (Partway through the second.) Sensei's Library online is often a good intro to some things too. For manual scoring, the important thing I think is to have a mostly completed board, at the very least borders have been all established so no outside invasion points from e.g. the edges, then if you want you can pretty easily re-arrange stones within boundaries into quads for easier counting and use either area or territory scoring. I like territory scoring since there's less to count: add in the captured/dead opponent's stones to their territory, count all the empty spots remaining. In most games with my coworker though, I use this app to score: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jimrandomh... (Must load pic from gallery.) Occasionally I'll compare its output to my own scoring or even take its sgf and run it through gnugo's scorer, the winner outcomes have always been the same on completed boards even if the exact numbers have differed...
If your kid likes anime, Hikaru No Go is great.
- The Graded Go Problems for Beginners (http://www.amazon.com/Graded-Problems-Beginners-Beginner-Ele...) has four volumes of increasingly difficult tactical problems. For the strategic side of things, I enjoyed Janice Kim's Learn To Play Go series, which has five or more volumes (http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Play-Go-Masters-Ultimate/dp/1453...)
And, of course, with Go you have a nice progression from learning to play on the 9x9 board for tactics, the 13x13 board to begin learning strategy, and the 19x19 board to play the real game. And thanks to the handicapping system, you can play much stronger players with both of you playing your hardest and both with a chance to win.
- The "learn to play go" series of five books by Janice Kim is the best.
- When I was eight years old, my father taught me to play Go. My father is terrible at Go, probably the worst player I've ever played. So, I entered college thinking I was fairly good.
I got completely, embarrassingly, destroyed in my first game. And the next two.
After that, I read a book on it, probably the same one the author read (Learn to Play Go by Janice Kim) and didn't really follow at all. Still getting destroyed.
Then I did what the author didn't do: I played at least twenty games of Go a day. I played a Windows program called Igowin, I played a really bad Palm app while standing in lines or on the bus, I played GNU Go on my laptop.
At first I lost every time, then about half the time, then almost never, at which point I played a human again.
And got destroyed, because I had learned tricks to beat the computer, rather than actual good Go techniques.
I guess my point is that this taught me two things: when learning something, there is no substitute for doing it twenty times a day; and that no matter how much you think you have Go figured out, you probably don't.
