“You may find yourself wanting to learn the formal concepts of computer science. However, you soon realize that finding ways to learn these topics is rather difficult. Online resources can be both expensive and variable with what they expect you to know. Most resources assume you have the mathematical prerequisites mastered, or expect that you have an academic background in STEM. It is difficult to find a starting point that feels conquerable for those outside of the field of science. This is precisely how I felt.

I created this list of books and ordered them in such a way that reading them would feel achievable. What is here is not only the foundation of the discipline, but these books touch on the core course content of computer science. That core content being: Computer Architecture & Organization, Data Structures & Algorithms, and Computational Theory.”

Source: 10 Books for the Self-Taught Computer Scientist

Un-put-down-able books, for me, have certain qualities: great characters, strong narrative drive, a premise that hooks me. The writing is often strong (though “serviceable” will suffice, if you know what I mean), and it can’t be so dense or challenging that I can’t read it while I’m sleepy, or mentally exhausted.

From the website, Modern Mrs Darcy (How to get more out of your reading life), here are Unputdownable: 17 books I read in 24 hours or less (because they were just that good)

Join their Summer Reading Club here

Reading an entire book in a matter of hours may seem daunting, but it all comes down to simple math. The average adult reads around 200-400 words per minute. The average novel ranges between 60,000 and 100,000 words total. If your reading speed is right in the middle of the pack at 300 words per minute, and you’re reading a middle-of-the-pack novel at around 80,000 words, you’ll be able to knock it out in around five hours or less.

Find out more in Lifehacker’s article How to Read an Entire Book in a Single Day

2020 is Florence Nightingale’s bicentenary, but like all Museums the Florence Nightingale Museum in London s closed, however, there are a number of online resources to find out more about here.

Famous for being the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ who organised the nursing of sick and wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale’s far-sighted ideas and reforms have influenced the very nature of modern healthcare.

Her greatest achievement was to transform nursing into a respectable profession for women and in 1860, she established the first professional training school for nurses, the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas’ Hospital.

Read her biography at the Florence Nightingale Museum

TimeOut (NY) reports

If you’re a lover of art books, the Guggenheim Museum offers more than 200 exhibition catalogs that you can download from its archives for free!

The titles date back to 1936—over 20 years before the museum moved into its iconic Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in 1959—and feature the biggest names in Modern and Contemporary Art: Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Vassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch and more

Go to the Guggenheim Archive here

Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes they’re annoying or even frustrating. They can disrupt you at the most inconvenient times. No, I’m not talking about your family members—good guess, though! I’m talking about hiccups.

What are hiccups? And are there scientific reasons behind why we get them?

Read What’s the Science Behind Why We Hiccup? on Quick and Dirty Tips

Want to learn the new words that seem to have now become part of our daily vernacular?  How many do you know or use?  (Personally, I had been using the abbreviations BC and AC – Before and After Corona – for a long time so it’s good to see that it’s made it into the list!)

Wonderful, delightful and comprehensive compilation of the new language emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic compiled by @tonythorne007

Amusing, useful, instructive, and demonstrating how utterly alive the English language and our communication are.https://t.co/eoicYtrAYD

— Ross Dawson (@rossdawson) May 2, 2020

Mayday is the word used around the world to make a distress call via radio communications. Mayday signals a life-threatening emergency, usually on a ship or a plane, although it may be used in a variety of other situations.

To find out where the word came from, read What Does Mayday Mean? on Wonderopolis

Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers’ Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don’t realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as “American” as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.

Read more in The Brief Origins of May Day