Yesterday’s post on calc generated an interesting discussion in the comments. Frequent commentor Phil offers a particularly nice example of an easy way to add up a row or column of numbers. That’s something that while it doesn’t come up everyday, does occur often enough that it’s worth learning how to do it easily.
Phil also noted that reddit had a pointer to a post by Mark Hepburn that collected some calc recipes from Andrew Hyatt. These recipes and those from Chris Wellons in yesterday’s post are, I think, a good way to get familiar with calc. I’ve tried working through the manual to learn calc but I always got overwhelmed and had a hard time remembering everything. By learning some specific methods for performing useful calculations that come up in your work, you get familiar with how things work and what’s available. After that, it’s much easier to figure out how to do something new.