Darren New wrote:

> It's very nice.

Why thank you. :-)

> There's nothing wrong with simplifications for 
> explaining this stuff to people who don't already know it.

Heh. Some people are all like "hey, strictly speaking a 'byte' isn't 
always 8 bits!" I mean, LIKE IT MATTERS HERE! Think of your audience, 
people. It's not like anybody reading this thing is going to design and 
build their own computed based soley on my writings. Sheesh...

> As Warp said, there are a few misspellings, but you know that. (I 
> spelled poorly for many years, until I started looking up every word I 
> wasn't sure of every time, and the hard ones started to sink in. :-)

If I had a way to check these [easily] it would probably help a lot...

> There are also a few correctly-spelled words that are just the wrong 
> choice of word. (E.g., Insert sort: "One of the lowest sorts.")

That's not even a spelling mistake; I merely didn't hit the S-key hard 
enough. ;-)

> In the "linked list", I'd not use the term pointer.

The term seems fairly natural to me. But then, I've been using it for 
well over a decade. Maybe I'll just expand on it a little. (Diagrams 
would *really* help here!)

> Typo: "We'll see what that might be useful later." (You mean "We'll see 
> how...")

Yeah. When you type lots of stuff, it's surprisingly easy to substitute 
high-frequency words such as "how", "what", "when", "that", etc. 
Sometimes it results in sentences that clearly don't make sense...

> Under "Deletions", it's not quite true that moving all the elements of 
> an unsorted list is as bad as moving the elements of a sorted list. You 
> can take the last element off the end of the unsorted list and stick it 
> in where you deleted the other element. Quite the inverse of adding an 
> element.

Ooo... I never actually thought of that!

> For bucket sort, you might want to give an example like sorting playing 
> cards, where you might split the deck into four suits and sort each suit 
> separately before putting them back together.  Just a thought...

Yes, probably.

> You need a conclusion section. A couple of paragraphs that summarizes 
> what you just spoke about. Otherwise it's like ending a murder mystery 
> with the detective revealing who dun it.

Yeah, it does feel like it says a whole crapload of stuff, and then 
just... ends. I'm not really sure what a sensible ending would be though.

> Your margins are somewhat wider than they really need to be, unless 
> you're publishing for a particular journal or something.

Those are LaTeX defaults. If you print it out on paper and bind one edge 
together, it looks about right. (Most of the margin ends up in the 
fold.) It's also tuned so that the lines of text are narrow enough that 
you can easily scan from the end of one line to the beginning of the 
next; the wider the lines, the harder this is. (Go find some random 
website with lots of text, taking up the full width of your monitor. It 
can actually be quite difficult to figure out which line you've just 
read because of the visual distance.)

But yeah, I suppose it does look a little strange. I don't plan on 
fiddling with TeX's defaults to change it though.

> Overall, highly impressive for a layman's introduction. Seriously, you 
> write very well: Entertaining plus informative. Very well done.

Thank you. If more people said stuff like this to me, I'd probably write 
a lot more often. But typically, I spend ages writing stuff and nobody 
ever even reads it, and I just feel like "meh, why am I bothering?"

I consider myself to be very *good* at explaining stuff in simple terms. 
As I've said, the key is figuring out what's important and what isn't. 
My whole document doesn't say *anything* about cache coherancy. I just 
said "quicksort should theoretically be as fast as mergesort, but ON A 
COMPUTER it actually tends to be slightly faster". No need to go into 
technical details about why.

When I'm bored, I often sit by myself and have imaginary conversations 
with nonexistant people, tellin them all about... any stuff I know 
about, really. Maybe I'll summon up a caveman and try to explain to him 
how supply and demand affects the price of goods. Or perhaps I'll find a 
1960s electrical engineer and tell him about the superior noise 
rejection characteristics of digital electronics. Or maybe I'll chatter 
with some long-dead mathematician about chaos theory and fractal 
geometry... It depends on my mood.

Come to think of it, as long as I can remember, ever since I was a very 
small child, I've *always* talked to imaginary people.

...shit, I should probably have had *FREINDS* instead! o_O



Oh...kay...well leaving that aside, I wonder if maybe a good way of 
structuring a book would be to just record myself nattering out loud, 
and write a transcript afterwards? :-D

> Out of 
> curiosity, how long did it take you to put this together?  I mean, once 
> you decided to write it, how long did it take in terms of your hours spent?

I spent about 3 hours writing it on Wednesday. Today I corrected a 
handful of typos, and added the final few paragraphs. I can't have spent 
more than an hour doing that.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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