same. it's a perfectly fine shitty radio. i have 3 of them that i keep stashed in various places. they certainly aren't as nice as my yaesu, and they do splatter, but they do work just fine.
Hah! What a great bit of word-smithing there. I love it. Yes, that's a good description of the Baofeng radios. They're crap, but they're fine crap. Cheap, but workable as a beginner radio. I bought mine right when I got my Technician license, and it's served well for dipping my toes in the water a little. But I'll be buying a higher quality radio soon, if all goes according to plan.
It depends on how much money you have, and how interested in VHF/UHF you are. If you're very interested in VHF/UHF (repeaters, simplex with your neighbors) and you only have $20, then it's the perfect radio for you.
If you have $10,000 and want to chat with people around the world, then you'll want something else. People hear "ham radio" and think "chatting with people all around the world", but that is not what Baofeng radios do :)
I am following that guide to get me started. Taking the recommended courses, I finished the cis194 Spring 2013 course and I am getting through the NICTA course, with help from #Haskell on freenode IRC.
Based on my experience the recommendations are good, but when working on material like this on your own it is a slog because both of these courses are designed to be taught live. So beware. However they are probably the best courses available online. It seems someone (maybe me someday!) needs to do an equivalent of "RailsCasts" for Haskell to make this more accessible.
The NICTA course contains hard exercises building various functors, including transformers. It's a mind bender and oddly I had code that worked because the types matched up but I had no intuition as to why it actually worked! But it does raise your game to a new level.
>but when working on material like this on your own it is a slog because both of these courses are designed to be taught live. So beware. However they are probably the best courses available online.
Definitely, this is why we're working on a book. We acknowledge cis194 and NICTA course are difficult and designed to be done as part of a class. That's also why we suggest Thompson's book as a fallback.
There isn't a book designed for an independent reader that we're happy with at present.
>The NICTA course contains hard exercises building various functors, including transformers
These things must be covered if you want to use Haskell in anger. One thing I would change in NICTA course if given the option is to make the transformers tutorial have a smoother ramp. State/StateT could be built up to via Writer/Reader and the transformer versions thereof.
That the NICTA course confronts these (Functor, Applicative, Monad, Monad transformers) and is rigorous in covering the basics along with those topics is what makes it so valuable. Most other materials either don't cover them or don't provide proper exercises.
"Show & Tell" is not good enough for getting people comfortable with these tools and sadly that's the mistake a lot of resources for Haskell make. You have to make exercises that make learners manipulate and see the structure of how these things work.
Good answers. To be clear I am not complaining. Actually I love it. I love struggling through it and the feeling of triumph when solving those problems.
I think the difficulty is a rite of passage to become a functional programmer, however smoother ramps would help, and I am sure your book will be a great help and is much needed.
Oh sure, I didn't figure you were. I just wanted (other) people to understand that, yes, we're aware of the friction and difficulties and that we're working on it.
>I think the difficulty is a rite of passage to become a functional programmer
Hum. There's some place and purpose for this, such as with professional fields like law and medicine. I'm not sure add'l difficulty beyond what is essential to understanding the material is valuable except as a historic social "glue" for embattled/relatively small programming language communities like Haskell and ML.
>I am sure your book will be a great help and is much needed.
We hope so and believe it'll be an improvement. We've been testing the material pretty aggressively with people completely new to programming. We're going to start testing with people that already code but don't know FP soon.
If the book sells well enough, we've got follow-up books in mind (4+ in the queue).
I love this book for it's, ah, eloquent and inclusive way of describing more advanced JS topics. Definitely of value, even for the more experienced JS dev.
I put together a similar talk last summer: http://thedrearlight.com/functional-js-wut unfortunately, don't have the vid either, but the slides might be complementary to the ones linked by the OP.
--edit
It's formatted kinda weird, where both up/down and left/right arrows navigate through the different sections.
Very nice talk! I've used that formatting too, and while it can be very useful when running a presentation by yourself, it's not so nice for slides shared with someone who doesn't know it.
