David Malan

And I hope to...

In so far as we've been a bit unusual, both with our production volume and openness, trying to sort of offer an example that others could follow that, hey, maybe more people should be doing this, more people should be sharing, leaning on us, us leaning on them, because I do think that's still a missed opportunity educationally.

My favorite book is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I think everyone should read that or play the terminal-based video game that existed when I was growing up of it.

Funny enough, within CS50's courses, it's been a few years since we officially recommended any books.

This is partly consistent with our commitment to openness and for everything being free so that there isn't some financial barrier to someone out there to needing a textbook for the course.

That said...

over the years and to this day some of my favorite tech books even though they're increasingly outdated are this brilliantly colorful picturesque easy to understand and accessible book called how computers work which we used in that course i first taught in 1999 and how the internet works and i think they eventually stopped updating them some years ago but they were such wonderful educational tools i think every subject should have a book that looks quite like that

More arcanely, there's a book that we still recommend to students unofficially or if they really want to go pursue something more arcane in C called The Hacker's Delight, which is this wonderful hardcover book that just has really neat bit trickery and low-level hacks, low-level techniques you can use to make your C code especially all the more performant.

So there's a lot of value in a book like that.

But I think back years ago to when I was learning some stuff in technology and like the Four Dummies books was great.

I think for some time we might have recommended one of the Complete Idiots guides or something like that, which doesn't have the best semantics.

But the reality is they are by design written for a very broad, accessible audience.

And I think that has a lot of value as opposed to the more traditional textbook where you sort of have to have taken the class in order to understand the book.

Okay, so that one also has the... Other than having access to a computer and the internet, there's no financial requirements.

explore more i do think i i wish i had more jobs under my belt early on which i think was the result of my being pulled back into choosing to go back into academia i think it would have been healthy if i had allowed myself maybe another year or two in between undergrad and graduate school or it probably would have worked out well if cs50 hadn't opened up for me right as i was finishing my phd because then i probably would have gone off to industry for some amount of time and

That said, not sure I would have gotten the job if I had wandered off campus at that point.

So it probably worked out for the best.

But I had such fun when I was interning, so to speak, at GitHub, that it would be fun to live more of the lives that some of my friends in tech have lived.