Reddit reviews Foundations Of Algorithms

I'm a Linguistic BS student, but I've taken many CS classes as a minor and greatly enjoyed them. There's a lot of programming that you don't learn easily from just doing.

The book from that class was this one. Note that it's a CS book, not a programming book, and so a lot of it is based on a knowledge of discrete structures and mathematics (at least a good deal of algebra). Before I took that class I had to take a class that used this book, which is based more-so on logic and discrete mathematics than anything else.

You won't learn to program from those books. What you will learn is the fundamentals behind the data structures and algorithms that every major language is based on. When I learn a new language, I find myself understanding the various data structures very quickly because I have theoretical background. My friend who has a more IT-oriented background from a different college usually has to learn the details of new languages by analogy, and it seems to take him some time.