I mostly agree, and would say you should just play it blind. If you care about getting 100% (112% after the DLC) there are probably a couple of things where looking them up would be useful. It is also a very big world, so trying to do cleanup once you have all exploration tools can be quite involved
It is very much worth playing but you could probably skip it. As others have alluded to, the storytelling is very influenced by Fromsoft (Souls games, basically) and is pretty oblique. But, even without following it exactly, the gameplay itself is still great, and the music and art do an excellent job setting up a melancholy vibe. The different zones have a lot of personality.
Addendum: having now had the chance to start on Silksong, strongly recommend Hollow Knight first. That's not because of story, but because Silksong seems like it's geared to be noticeably more difficult than Hollow Knight was, both in platforming and in combat. (One of the things that I think Hollow Knight did really well was the spread of available difficulties. Beating the game isn't too hard; getting the true ending involves a few more specific difficult tests; and the DLC added boss gauntlets that let you go pretty crazy with how hard you want to make it.)
I would assume that's mostly a function of this being for a general audience. Yes, you absolutely can talk about quasiparticles using techniques adapted from QFT. I don't know if Landau originally conceived of it that way, but there were definitely a bunch of Soviet physicists shortly after him who did.
The recommendations in this thread so far do suggest a lot of nice books - CS:APP and SICP - but given your description of previous struggles with more academic stuff, along with the request for "practical examples or projects", I'm not sure they are right for you. By all means take a look, but don't be discouraged if they don't fit what you're after. An algorithm book with a somewhat different tone that you might check out is Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual. I've been reading Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design recently and that might also be something that would interest you.
However, I might suggest that books and theoretical knowledge are not the main things you need right away. I moved into software engineering after a long time in science. I had done plenty of coding, and had a pretty decent amount of theoretical knowledge, but there was still quite a bit of practical adjustment. I really like Rzor's suggestion of https://missing.csail.mit.edu to start with.
Beyond that, I think maybe I would find some specific codebases that you'd like to understand better, and start with reading more of those. I feel like that's often better than books for picking up idiomatic usage and patterns in given domains. As you hit specific barriers, I think it will be much easier to pick up the intrinsic motivation to dip back into theoretical knowledge at that point.
Yeah, I would not point somebody unfamiliar with Stern-Gerlach trying to learn "the basic idea of quantum mechanics" at Sakurai. Feynman lectures vol. 3 maybe
Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed.
Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was characters on the same planet but it was actually cool. The first two books are definitely among my favorite sci-fi of all time, the third one was a dud.
My main gripe is that these three books all share the same trope that underpins one of the major subplots: glib, charming politician type is scheming, eeeeevil. In the first two books, there's enough novelty (how the Tines and Spiders work, programming as archaeology, localizer mania) to make up for that. But I don't really think the third book adds much in the same way, and it is also very clearly building to a confrontation that will happen in a future book. So the staleness is much more noticeable
I spent quite a bit of time at the end of high school into early college playing on a Forgotten Realms themed MUD. It accomplished two valuable things: it durably increased my typing speed by 20-30 wpm, and it also inoculated me against the MMOs which would have been way more destructive for me.
You might be interested in Kip Thorne (of Gravitation fame) and Roger Blandford's book Modern Classical Physics, which is designed to cover the elements of non-quantum physics that are generally ignored in the first year PhD curriculum. Part headers: statistical physics; optics; elasticity; fluid dynamics; plasma physics; general relativity
I second the recommendation of this book -- it really is quite excellent and covers at an advanced level most of what is commonly left out of a modern physics curriculum (though it is quite imposing in its size/weight).
