Teaching Programming Skills via Math Concepts

[jedishrfu]

Got this for Christmas and its quite interesting to read:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321942043/?tag=pfamazon01-20

The basic premise of the book is to explore the principles of generic programming, optimization and the mathematical concept of abstraction using traditional mathematical algorithms.

Examples are in C++ but could be easily adapted to other common languages.

 

[berkeman]

Sounds interesting... Let us know what you think as you go through it. From the Amazon description of the book:

You will learn about

• How to generalize a four thousand-year-old algorithm, demonstrating indispensable lessons about clarity and efficiency
• Ancient paradoxes, beautiful theorems, and the productive tension between continuous and discrete
• A simple algorithm for finding greatest common divisor (GCD) and modern abstractions that build on it
• Powerful mathematical approaches to abstraction
• How abstract algebra provides the idea at the heart of generic programming
• Axioms, proofs, theories, and models: using mathematical techniques to organize knowledge about your algorithms and data structures
• Surprising subtleties of simple programming tasks and what you can learn from them
• How practical implementations can exploit theoretical knowledge