Learning Go


Book Description

Go is rapidly becoming the preferred language for building web services. While there are plenty of tutorials available that teach Go's syntax to developers with experience in other programming languages, tutorials aren't enough. They don't teach Go's idioms, so developers end up recreating patterns that don't make sense in a Go context. This practical guide provides the essential background you need to write clear and idiomatic Go. No matter your level of experience, you'll learn how to think like a Go developer. Author Jon Bodner introduces the design patterns experienced Go developers have adopted and explores the rationale for using them. You'll also get a preview of Go's upcoming generics support and how it fits into the language. Learn how to write idiomatic code in Go and design a Go project Understand the reasons for the design decisions in Go Set up a Go development environment for a solo developer or team Learn how and when to use reflection, unsafe, and cgo Discover how Go's features allow the language to run efficiently Know which Go features you should use sparingly or not at all




Learning As I Go


Book Description

An eccentric romp of a book, Learning As I Go takes shots at our messy culture, picks a lover's quarrel with the Catholic Church, throws unabashed educational advice at young people, and pays homage to books and writers. Along the way, Jeff Minick looks at burka babes and crazy ladies, finds beauty in small places, shops with Flannery O'Connor at WalMart, shakes hands with adult adolescents, and examines honor and duty in a world which seems bereft of both. All of Joe Ecclesia's "Letters to the Bishop," originally published in Chronicles Magazine, are included here. In addition, there are twenty-nine other essays, nearly all of which have appeared in Chronicles, the Smoky Mountain News, vocabula.com, and other magazines. Minick is also the author of the novel Amanda Bell. Of this story of loss and redemption, one online reviewer wrote: "Victimized by a series of unfortunate events, Amanda Bell--a beautiful, twenty-seven-year-old woman--seeks to recede further and further into herself...Meeting an unlikely figure in modern literature, however, Amanda slowly lets down her walls and eventually lets herself slip into love. Amanda Bell may remind us all that love comes in many forms."




Learning How to Learn


Book Description

A surprisingly simple way for students to master any subject--based on one of the world's most popular online courses and the bestselling book A Mind for Numbers A Mind for Numbers and its wildly popular online companion course "Learning How to Learn" have empowered more than two million learners of all ages from around the world to master subjects that they once struggled with. Fans often wish they'd discovered these learning strategies earlier and ask how they can help their kids master these skills as well. Now in this new book for kids and teens, the authors reveal how to make the most of time spent studying. We all have the tools to learn what might not seem to come naturally to us at first--the secret is to understand how the brain works so we can unlock its power. This book explains: Why sometimes letting your mind wander is an important part of the learning process How to avoid "rut think" in order to think outside the box Why having a poor memory can be a good thing The value of metaphors in developing understanding A simple, yet powerful, way to stop procrastinating Filled with illustrations, application questions, and exercises, this book makes learning easy and fun.




Deep Learning and the Game of Go


Book Description

Summary Deep Learning and the Game of Go teaches you how to apply the power of deep learning to complex reasoning tasks by building a Go-playing AI. After exposing you to the foundations of machine and deep learning, you'll use Python to build a bot and then teach it the rules of the game. Foreword by Thore Graepel, DeepMind Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology The ancient strategy game of Go is an incredible case study for AI. In 2016, a deep learning-based system shocked the Go world by defeating a world champion. Shortly after that, the upgraded AlphaGo Zero crushed the original bot by using deep reinforcement learning to master the game. Now, you can learn those same deep learning techniques by building your own Go bot! About the Book Deep Learning and the Game of Go introduces deep learning by teaching you to build a Go-winning bot. As you progress, you'll apply increasingly complex training techniques and strategies using the Python deep learning library Keras. You'll enjoy watching your bot master the game of Go, and along the way, you'll discover how to apply your new deep learning skills to a wide range of other scenarios! What's inside Build and teach a self-improving game AI Enhance classical game AI systems with deep learning Implement neural networks for deep learning About the Reader All you need are basic Python skills and high school-level math. No deep learning experience required. About the Author Max Pumperla and Kevin Ferguson are experienced deep learning specialists skilled in distributed systems and data science. Together, Max and Kevin built the open source bot BetaGo. Table of Contents PART 1 - FOUNDATIONS Toward deep learning: a machine-learning introduction Go as a machine-learning problem Implementing your first Go bot PART 2 - MACHINE LEARNING AND GAME AI Playing games with tree search Getting started with neural networks Designing a neural network for Go data Learning from data: a deep-learning bot Deploying bots in the wild Learning by practice: reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning with policy gradients Reinforcement learning with value methods Reinforcement learning with actor-critic methods PART 3 - GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS AlphaGo: Bringing it all together AlphaGo Zero: Integrating tree search with reinforcement learning




The First 20 Hours


Book Description

Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less? Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of prac­ticing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct com­plex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By complet­ing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the meth­ods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard key­board, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the sim­ple techniques he teaches: Define your target performance level: Fig­ure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better. Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcompo­nents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first. Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice. Create fast feedback loops: Getting accu­rate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve. Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chain­saws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.




The Go Programming Language


Book Description

The Go Programming Language is the authoritative resource for any programmer who wants to learn Go. It shows how to write clear and idiomatic Go to solve real-world problems. The book does not assume prior knowledge of Go nor experience with any specific language, so you’ll find it accessible whether you’re most comfortable with JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Java, or C++. The first chapter is a tutorial on the basic concepts of Go, introduced through programs for file I/O and text processing, simple graphics, and web clients and servers. Early chapters cover the structural elements of Go programs: syntax, control flow, data types, and the organization of a program into packages, files, and functions. The examples illustrate many packages from the standard library and show how to create new ones of your own. Later chapters explain the package mechanism in more detail, and how to build, test, and maintain projects using the go tool. The chapters on methods and interfaces introduce Go’s unconventional approach to object-oriented programming, in which methods can be declared on any type and interfaces are implicitly satisfied. They explain the key principles of encapsulation, composition, and substitutability using realistic examples. Two chapters on concurrency present in-depth approaches to this increasingly important topic. The first, which covers the basic mechanisms of goroutines and channels, illustrates the style known as communicating sequential processes for which Go is renowned. The second covers more traditional aspects of concurrency with shared variables. These chapters provide a solid foundation for programmers encountering concurrency for the first time. The final two chapters explore lower-level features of Go. One covers the art of metaprogramming using reflection. The other shows how to use the unsafe package to step outside the type system for special situations, and how to use the cgo tool to create Go bindings for C libraries. The book features hundreds of interesting and practical examples of well-written Go code that cover the whole language, its most important packages, and a wide range of applications. Each chapter has exercises to test your understanding and explore extensions and alternatives. Source code is freely available for download from http://gopl.io/ and may be conveniently fetched, built, and installed using the go get command.




Movies Make the Man


Book Description

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power, mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil, and I want you to remember this...true love never dies. You remember that, boy...Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in." --Hub McCann, Secondhand Lions In the film Secondhand Lions, Hub McCann, a soldier and adventurer grown old in years but not in spirit, frequently teaches teenage males the meaning of manhood. He lives by a code of honor and courage, and tries to pass on that code to young men in trouble. Father, grandfather, and teacher, Jeff Minick has also witnessed first-hand the struggles of young men striving to belong to a world that often seems bent on abolishing manhood altogether. Young men between the ages of sixteen and thirty can make babies, go to war, and even earn large incomes, but some of them remain arrested adolescents. They lack a code to live by. Frequently they lack a model for manhood. Movies Make The Man: The Hollywood Guide to Life, Love, and Faith seeks to provide such models. Using as evidence dozens of popular movies, Minick examines the meaning of courage, wisdom, love, honor, and faith in relationship to manhood. Using films as varied as Gladiator, Bridget Jones's Diary, Master and Commander, and Kate and Leopold, Minick shares with readers the lessons for men found in these great films, lessons ranging from how to treat a woman on a first date to the place of faith in a man's life. To perform meaningful work, to believe in something worthy of our belief, to find someone to love: these building blocks for a life lived with purpose can all be found on the big screen. Movies Make The Man should appeal not only to young men, but also to parents, teachers, coaches, and other mentors. From reviews of Jeff Minick's other books: Amanda Bell: "Jeff Minick's novel is a mix of humor and tragedy, warmth and somberness that will echo deep in reader's souls." --Eugene Girin, Chronicles Magazine Learning As I Go: "Delivered with wit and style, Jeff Minick's comments on politics and religion fit my own sentiments exactly." --Joe Ecclesia, Smoky Mountain News Dust On Their Wings: "One need not be a believer to appreciate Dust On Their Wings, though someone who accepts the reality of angels and of 'the Love that moves the sun and the other stars' will find in these pages particular satisfaction in a tale well told." Karl Keating, Online Review




Learning Go Programming


Book Description

An insightful guide to learning the Go programming language About This Book Insightful coverage of Go programming syntax, constructs, and idioms to help you understand Go code effectively Push your Go skills, with topics such as, data types, channels, concurrency, object-oriented Go, testing, and network programming Each chapter provides working code samples that are designed to help reader quickly understand respective topic Who This Book Is For If you have prior exposure to programming and are interested in learning the Go programming language, this book is designed for you. It will quickly run you through the basics of programming to let you exploit a number of features offered by Go programming language. What You Will Learn Install and configure the Go development environment to quickly get started with your first program. Use the basic elements of the language including source code structure, variables, constants, and control flow primitives to quickly get started with Go Gain practical insight into the use of Go's type system including basic and composite types such as maps, slices, and structs. Use interface types and techniques such as embedding to create idiomatic object-oriented programs in Go. Develop effective functions that are encapsulated in well-organized package structures with support for error handling and panic recovery. Implement goroutine, channels, and other concurrency primitives to write highly-concurrent and safe Go code Write tested and benchmarked code using Go's built test tools Access OS resources by calling C libraries and interact with program environment at runtime In Detail The Go programming language has firmly established itself as a favorite for building complex and scalable system applications. Go offers a direct and practical approach to programming that let programmers write correct and predictable code using concurrency idioms and a full-featured standard library. This is a step-by-step, practical guide full of real world examples to help you get started with Go in no time at all. We start off by understanding the fundamentals of Go, followed by a detailed description of the Go data types, program structures and Maps. After this, you learn how to use Go concurrency idioms to avoid pitfalls and create programs that are exact in expected behavior. Next, you will be familiarized with the tools and libraries that are available in Go for writing and exercising tests, benchmarking, and code coverage. Finally, you will be able to utilize some of the most important features of GO such as, Network Programming and OS integration to build efficient applications. All the concepts are explained in a crisp and concise manner and by the end of this book; you would be able to create highly efficient programs that you can deploy over cloud. Style and approach The book is written to serve as a reader-friendly step-by-step guide to learning the Go programming language. Each topic is sequentially introduced to build on previous materials covered. Every concept is introduced with easy-to-follow code examples that focus on maximizing the understanding of the topic at hand.




Don't Go Back to School


Book Description

A handbook for independent learners based on 100 ethnographic interviews, with guidance, how-to, and interviewee stories.




Ultralearning


Book Description

Now a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Learn a new talent, stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way. Ultralearning offers nine principles to master hard skills quickly. This is the essential guide to future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage through self-education. In these tumultuous times of economic and technological change, staying ahead depends on continual self-education—a lifelong mastery of fresh ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner. The challenge of learning new skills is that you think you already know how best to learn, as you did as a student, so you rerun old routines and old ways of solving problems. To counter that, Ultralearning offers powerful strategies to break you out of those mental ruts and introduces new training methods to help you push through to higher levels of retention. Scott H. Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself—among them Benjamin Franklin, chess grandmaster Judit Polgár, and Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymath Nigel Richards, who won the French World Scrabble Championship—without knowing French. Young documents the methods he and others have used to acquire knowledge and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares a proven framework for a successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and exe - cute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple tools to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.