I've always been a lifelong learner and have always tried to get through digital textbooks. Anyone who's used pdf textbooks know how much of a love/hate relationship it is.
There are so many foundational textbooks published online for free now such as OSTEP, Modern Robotics, and Applied Linear Algebra just to name a few.
I've always preferred reading textbooks physically and writing inside them, but now with LLMs, it's nice to be able to just paste in passages to ChatGPT and ask for clarification.
I've tried so many different types of digital note taking like Notability, Goodnotes, Margin Note, etc but none of them really made it easy for me to dive into dense material. I find myself getting distracted trying to take notes and forgetting what I just read.
Out of my frustration, I decided to create my own tool and have been using it to get through my own personal studies. I built it around these core principles.
- Technical textbooks are dense. I need to be able to quickly jot down a thought without distracting myself
- I need to be able to pick up from where I left off quickly when I have quick bursts of inspiration to study
- I need to be able to take scattered notes, and synthesize them into a cohesive subtopics so I can build on top of this knowledge as I progress in the textbook
- Using the textbook needs to be fluid. It must be a good PDF reader first and foremost.
I can safely say that what I've built is by far my favorite way to study any deep material. I'm able to take things line by line to truly understand how the author has built up their reasoning.
This might be a biased view but firmly believe this tool could help anyone who have always tried learning new material.
There are so many good free resources out there now, especially in AI, Math, Robotics. It's never been a better time to learn and I hope Margin helps anyone who's attempted to get through dense material as much as it has helped me.
There are so many foundational textbooks published online for free now such as OSTEP, Modern Robotics, and Applied Linear Algebra just to name a few.
- https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ - https://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/index.php/Modern_Robotic... - https://web.stanford.edu/~boyd/vmls/
I've always preferred reading textbooks physically and writing inside them, but now with LLMs, it's nice to be able to just paste in passages to ChatGPT and ask for clarification.
I've tried so many different types of digital note taking like Notability, Goodnotes, Margin Note, etc but none of them really made it easy for me to dive into dense material. I find myself getting distracted trying to take notes and forgetting what I just read.
Out of my frustration, I decided to create my own tool and have been using it to get through my own personal studies. I built it around these core principles.
- Technical textbooks are dense. I need to be able to quickly jot down a thought without distracting myself - I need to be able to pick up from where I left off quickly when I have quick bursts of inspiration to study - I need to be able to take scattered notes, and synthesize them into a cohesive subtopics so I can build on top of this knowledge as I progress in the textbook - Using the textbook needs to be fluid. It must be a good PDF reader first and foremost.
I can safely say that what I've built is by far my favorite way to study any deep material. I'm able to take things line by line to truly understand how the author has built up their reasoning.
This might be a biased view but firmly believe this tool could help anyone who have always tried learning new material.
There are so many good free resources out there now, especially in AI, Math, Robotics. It's never been a better time to learn and I hope Margin helps anyone who's attempted to get through dense material as much as it has helped me.