bddbbdb

Tech/business jargon: "leverage" (when used as a verb) anywhere: "utilize" (when used as a word)

Concrete Mathematics is (as it says itself) intended for first year grad students. It is certainly good, but it is NOT for a "complete noobie". I am in a similar situation, and am finding Vellman's "How to Prove It" extremely useful. Having poked around the edges of math for about a year, I finally realized that proofs are central to mathematical maturity... No more eyes crossing when I read a new CS textbook!

Stonemason, artist, (unemployed) mathematician.

Little Schemer, then SICP. For sure. As for TDD, take a look at SchemeUnit, which I've found very handy in testing the exercises in Little Schemer.

SICP is one of the single most valuable and important texts in CS. Little Schemer is structured as a real training regimen to get your mental muscles ready to handle that theory.

Please provide ashtrays and convenient places to dispose of them. We'll use them when they are available.

THC does not make you a better programmer, though I suppose there could be some Balmer-peak like point of intoxication out there. I did once have an interesting insight into the my mind on drugs, though, in writing a simple TI-83+ program for use in a rangefinder my friends and I decided to build while high. The final product worked exactly correctly, but when I examined the code in a non-intoxicated state, I saw that I had used some fairly elaborate trig identities, when the most appropriate solution would have simply been the tangent. That said, cannabis does tend to get me doing something right away, even if I dispense with the original work half the time. The sense of pure fascination is sometimes of great value.

Now the real question is whether LSD improves my math skills.