I advise taking a look at the mir titles or the Israel Gelfand books. Looking from it, Russian are really good at producing top notch popular science.
Tough there is no fry, their math book are almost game like, with few carefully built example and very clear explanation using only some diagram when needed (consequently their book are quite small) and the exercise are absolutely not rote based, except the first few exercice, and even then they all serve to illustrate a specific part of a concept, all the others are puzzle like problem.
Putting lots of full color image is not making math "fun", well built and interesting problem is.
OMG I LOVED THE MIR BOOKS! Yes, they were incredibly simple, weren't littered with images, only essential diagrams. And the English translations were very good... I can only imagine what the Russian language versions were.
Fair enough. To be honest my issue comes from the self made man self driven car - david vs goliath thing he conveys often. I understand the fact that businesses have suboptimal structures and negative incentives in terms of engineering and technical prowess. And we all want real and beautiful innovation to happen as quick as possible. But his mashup of computer vision hooked into the electronic steering control was way less impressive to me than to the iphone/ps3 era crowd. Especially considering the social aspect of a ton of steel moving in public.
Maybe partner with the creator of the XXX simulator series, you could make some kind of "MMO" where each participants have to run errands the safest way possible while interacting with each other, and upload the training data. Some player could be randomly elected as "maverick" whose goal is to crash and cause accident, the other player would have to handle them.
And if driving in highway is a problem, why not use a test terrain complete with fog generator? With RC car representing pedestrian, other car, animal, ... feed the video first into an AR system and then give it to the neural net.
I totally agree, and this is why I am quite angry with the "basic is bad for your brain" statement from Djiktra. I understand the sentiment, but the idea that starting with very basic "non-rigorous" language is not only a waste of time but will even hold you back make me lost several years on my programming career.
I see where he was coming from but I initially learnt BASIC (on a ZX-81) then moved to Pascal (Turbo Pascal on DOS) then Delphi with side branches into C and a some other languages.
These days I'm a web dev mostly using PHP and a lot of Python, I feel no need to justify my choices anymore, I could write a HTTP stack in C if I wanted to but I choose not to.
Ruby looks interesting, Go looks interesting, all this stuff is good stuff, I hate the attitude of "because X exists I must defend my choice of Y to the death", nothing is lost personally when someone else uses another language.
As a budding a student of electronics, I found the mims book to be while not very rigorous to provide a good general overview and intuition on the field, which makes subsequent more "serious" more manageable, could you give more details as to why I should not read it?
I read "Getting Started" over and over from age 7 or so. Nothing else made any sense at that age. It took me a while to digest it but I did figure out enough to do more with the "160 in one electronics board" [1] than the circuits suggested in its book.
Despite all the things I left out I am grateful that I had it. If it went on and on about engineering calculations, I would not have had the capacity or patience. I would recommend other books if asked by an adult, but is something better out now for kids?
TAE, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Mims, and Charles Platt's series for Make tend to be the ones that come up most frequently, but I'd be curious to hear if you've found others that are excellent.
TAE of course. I also like Peter Wilson, _The Circuit Designer's Companion_, the 3rd edition is published 2012 by Newnes. It's on libgen if you want to look through it before buying.
Game that use hardware hack are also fascinating, the superfx chip story is very nice.