Physicist Amok

Peter Norvig has addressed this question. Eric Raymond has his nice essay on the subject. But these don’t provide much guidance for the beginner who wants to know “which books do I sit down and churn through?”

The short answer: The Haskell Road to Maths, Logic, and Programming by Doets and van Eijck (what appears to be an earlier draft is available in PDF here), and then Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (also available online).

The long answer:

Until you understand what Abelson and Sussman are about in their book, you’re missing the whole point of computer science. Peter Norvig wrote about it,

“…if you’re like me, you’re not looking for one more trick, rather you’re looking for a way of synthesizing what you already know and building a rich framework onto which you can add new learning over a career. That’s what SICP has done for me. I read a draft version of the book around 1982 and it changed the way I think about my profession.”

Unfortunately, SICP requires a fair degree of intellectual, indeed mathematical, maturity. That’s where Doets and van Eijck comes in. Hopefully it will guide you far enough up the slope where SICP makes sense.

After this, there remains only one development in programming languages which you won’t be able to take completely in stride: monads and all the apparatus around them. But that’s a story for another day.