I've had the opportunity to speak with Gerry on a couple occasions. He's an incredibly nice and brilliant man. He pulled a postdoc into his office and they talked to me for about an hour on a huge variety of topics. He taught me the Y Combinator, gave me a pocket protector (same as the author's) and signed my copy of SICP. (Hal, unfortunately, was on sabbatical at Google at the time.)
What impressed me about Gerry was the incredibly wide variety of topics he could speak on, not just computer science and electrical engineering but many other hard sciences and I even remember him mentioning something about the ambiguity of ancient Hebrew. He had something intelligent to say about everything. A few other interesting points are that when he was my age (high school) he used his knowledge of chemistry to make explosives for fun, and he had a chair hanging from the ceiling he had built himself. Being around someone that knowledgeable and intelligent has the potential to automatically make you more ambitious, and it's something I recommend every young person do as soon as possible. (PG said something similar about showing founders how to be relentlessly resourceful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508048)
I came back and visited Gerry a few months later for a briefer visit. At the time I was deciding between colleges. He asked me about where I was considering and provided me the most helpful overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each of their cultures. Needless to say, he was a pretty big fan of MIT. ;)
He told me an interesting anecdote about Marvin Minsky that I haven't heard anywhere else so I'll put it here. We were discussing good procrastination. He said Minsky advised putting all mail in a pile, newest on top, and only processing the pile top-down. Then, once a month throw out the bottom half of the pile to save time. "Anything important will come twice," Minsky said.
This is a nitpick but I think the pledge should read "No first use of software patents against companies with fewer than 25 people," since people are countable:
I think Feynman may have used this book. He mentioned having a calculus book that had the same quotation that this one begins with:
"I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.' What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound."
Thanks for the advice (and thanks to the others who responded to my post). I think I'll still give K&R a shot, possibly with the notes a13x recommended (I haven't had the time to check them out yet), because I don't want to buy another book right now. If I find that I'm not getting excited about programming or not learning well from K&R, I'll switch to Python.
What impressed me about Gerry was the incredibly wide variety of topics he could speak on, not just computer science and electrical engineering but many other hard sciences and I even remember him mentioning something about the ambiguity of ancient Hebrew. He had something intelligent to say about everything. A few other interesting points are that when he was my age (high school) he used his knowledge of chemistry to make explosives for fun, and he had a chair hanging from the ceiling he had built himself. Being around someone that knowledgeable and intelligent has the potential to automatically make you more ambitious, and it's something I recommend every young person do as soon as possible. (PG said something similar about showing founders how to be relentlessly resourceful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508048)
I came back and visited Gerry a few months later for a briefer visit. At the time I was deciding between colleges. He asked me about where I was considering and provided me the most helpful overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each of their cultures. Needless to say, he was a pretty big fan of MIT. ;)
He told me an interesting anecdote about Marvin Minsky that I haven't heard anywhere else so I'll put it here. We were discussing good procrastination. He said Minsky advised putting all mail in a pile, newest on top, and only processing the pile top-down. Then, once a month throw out the bottom half of the pile to save time. "Anything important will come twice," Minsky said.