Xavdidtheshadow

For Sanderson specifically, his books are DRM-free wherever they are sold (apple/google/etc). Same goes for TOR publishing.

Past that, most books aren't available for DRM-free purchase. Breaking the DRM on an otherwise legally-purchased book is the next easiest thing. DeDRM tools are just a search away!

As another commenter notes, programming with a specific goal in mind is a good way to start. People can't sit down and learn "math", it's too broad a subject. Instead, you sit down and learn how to do a specific task (solve for x in an equation) and build from there. A lot of younger engineers today learned things like HTML/CSS/JS to customize/exploit Neopets and Myspace. It's not that they were interested in programming, they just wanted a result and figured out how to make it happen.

So to that end, I'd probably start with a project-oriented book, or give them tasks that require programming to solve (e.g. tell me the distribution of words in this Shakespeare play. What are the most common ones?).

Editor wise, VSCode is great, but may be too many bells and whistles. Sublime Text may be a better place to start, since it'll do highlighting, formatting, etc without being overwhelming.

Language wise, Python, JS, and Ruby all have ample beginner resources. Depending on what else they're into, JS is probably the most widely useful (since it's on most web pages and the sandbox is built right into the browser).

Good luck! Let us know how it goes!

> if you're looking for performance you probably aren't just blindly using the standard library sort anyway

That's so interesting- I think I have the opposite response. I figure unless I'm doing a very specific case that doesn't fit well with the stdlib sort (for some specific reason), It's probably good enough. Those language folks usually know their stuff, who am I to try something else?

I loved my pebble(s). 2 great stories:

1. They supported 3rd party watch faces based on a file. There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file and, if done from your phone, upload it right to the watch. Once, when out at midnight beer launch, I made a custom face for the beer and won a little keychain from the brewery. My apple watch is nowhere near this functionality.

2. Once time in 2014, I ran into some Pebble engineers at an ice cream shop in Palo Alto, they spotted my watch, they bought my scoop! Fun, weird little Silicon Valley moment.

I like some of their ideas for sure. I think it's a good starting point.

Sure, makes sense! It's a tough balance to strike, to be both informative enough to cover all the cases and slim enough to show only the breaking changes.

Thank you!

I wanted to use this, but it doesn't handle Smart Sync, a feature I find myself really taking advantage of. But, I'm glad this sort of thing exists!

> obscure and difficult-to-predict

I mean, I think there's something to that. Bash has a lot of arcane rules; I personally never write an `if` statement right, what with the `[[` vs `[` and having to surround the condition with whitespace. I find that bash scripts carry a million little gotchas that will cause variables to not evaluate/expand the way you'd expect.

Say what you will about Python, but it's much easier to reason about what a script will do as compared to bash (unless the bash is _extremely_ simplistic).

Do you have resources to this end that you'd recommend?