Until a few years ago I would have answered "Um copo de cólera", by Raduan Nassar... but then I read "Crônica da casa assassinada", by Lúcio Cardoso.
My favorite music album is "Fun House", by The Stooges. "Um copo de cólera" has the same chaotic fury of "Fun House", but transposed to literature - and "Um copo de cólera" is the same, but it was written 20 years earlier, is even stronger, and it touches lots of tabboo topics.
I don't know if there are decent translations of them from Portuguese to other languages.
"Cronopios and Famas", by Julio Cortázar - I read it for the first time when I was about 13 and for many years I reread at least once per year;
"Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Robert M. Pirsig)
"The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" (Yukio Mishima)
"The Yage Letters" (William Burroughs)
"The Old Ways" (Gary Snyder)
"Life and Death (Elementary Go Series #4)", by James Davies. Really - I studied that one very seriously.
Note: I answered just the "What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?" part, and I ignored that you are building a library for your children and asking for recommendations...
I use REPLs in ways that are similar to yours, but 1) you have several tricks that are new to me, and 2) you've been able to put into words many ideas that I haven't!
My main problem with SymPy is that I don't know where its community is! Maxima has a mailing list that is a really lovely place and an IRC channel that is (halfway between dead and) alive... what are the good places to ask questions about Sympy? Stackoverflow? Matrix? I just discovered that it has a group in Google Groups - that, ta-da! even has a recent message about the Gitter channel:
The thing below - one of the links at the bottom goes to its "Show HN" page, where people can check that only received 4 points. Many people discuss REPL tricks here, so I didn't expect it to flop so miserably...
Show HN: Eev and TikZ, or: how to learn TikZ using a REPL (twu.net)
Hi all, I made a video that at first sight is about a way to use REPLs to explore TikZ - and TikZ is a huge (La)TeX package for drawing graphics...
At second sight that video is about a series of tricks for using REPLs in Emacs, and TikZ is just an excuse to present them. As far as I know those tricks are very unusual; they implement a kind of "meta-REPL" that controls other REPLs, and they do that in a way that is much simpler, and much easier to hack, than Org's code blocks and than the cells in Jupyter notebooks.
The page has lots of screenshots and links, and it has instructions for downloading the video and its subtitles, and for reading the subtitles in plain text. I tried to make everything as accessible as possible for the people who just want to watch the the first two parts of the video - "Introduction" and "Trying it" - in super-high speed.
I'm especially interested in pointers to related work. Cheers, have fun, etc! =)
I find Org very hard to learn, mostly because I'm a "non-user" in the sense explained in the page below. Note that that page is about a video, and that it is possible to read the subtitles of the video without watching it by following the second link...
This is a bit of a meta-answer... many years ago I saw that I was not very good at writing error handling code for my scripts, so I (mostly) switched to this:
Let me use this comment to apologize for some of the videos...
I am very bad at learning things from videos. I usually have to take notes of what are the positions in a video that contain things that I want to learn, and then watch those segments many, many times... I've tried to record videos that I would like to watch, and in most cases this means: videos with a lot of information, that can be watched with little attention, that have indexes to let people find quickly what are the parts that they want to watch again, and that have "textual companions"... practically all the videos have tutorials or webpages associated to them, and there the instructions are - hopefully - easy to follow.
Most people (I will explain this soon!) _can_ learn all the main features of eev very quickly by just following the first sections of the main tutorial - this one:
...but I have the impression that that tutorial only works well for people who think in a certain way - I call them "non-users", and I explained that term in a video called "Org for Non-Users". My page about that video is here:
That video doesn't have subtitles and is 16:36 long, and very few people nowadays have the patience to watch something as long as that. So it's better to go to this page instead,
and read the transcription of another video, that is called "Why eev has a weird elisp tutorial and how to use it".
So, to be honest, most "non-users" can learn all the main features of eev very quickly by just following the first sections of the main tutorial of eev, but unfortunately these "non-users" are very few!...
Roughly, the people who can use Org or Hyperbole without getting incredibly annoyed by the parts of the code that are hard to understand are "users", and these people usually hate eev. The "non-users" are the people who can't "use" Org and Hyperbole because they always try to tinker with the source, and both Org and Hyperbole have tons of low-level functions that are hard to understand. The "non-users" usually agree with the design decisions behind eev, and the "users" usually think that eev is totally wrong.
The module of eev that used Expect to send lines to external programs was very hard to set up, and it has been replaced by this: http://angg.twu.net/eepitch.html
My favorite music album is "Fun House", by The Stooges. "Um copo de cólera" has the same chaotic fury of "Fun House", but transposed to literature - and "Um copo de cólera" is the same, but it was written 20 years earlier, is even stronger, and it touches lots of tabboo topics.
I don't know if there are decent translations of them from Portuguese to other languages.
My favorite book _that is available in English_ is "The Lives of Animals", by J.M. Coetzee: <https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/...>.