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Comment by jammygit | Hacker News Reader

I have volume 1 and I found it hard to get into. I think it presupposes a few concepts that my university skipped - eg, the correct way to approach writing a computer science proof (it comes up really early on in the exercises).

I often wonder what else comp sci students learned that us software engineering students did not. All I know for sure is that we did a ton more testing, architecture, hardware, math, and requirements. I think we did more applied programming too, based on trying to work with comp sci students who write custom sorting algorithms instead of thinking to type .sort(). We did not learn a ton of algorithms though

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I used to felt what you describe when I got into University (and I'm going forward slowly). I tried to learn all maths and solving problems, reproducing proofs and understanding the logic behind the proof (like the construction of mathematical objects that aid in proving something, a lemma or a theorem). Only after that period of maturing my maths background I could feel comfortable enough reading books on many topics.

If you don't feel comfortable you'd be wasting your time, fighting to get into the proofs.

I really believe CS programs and schools should implement courses on "Thinking ,learning and building".

Almost no schools, even great ones, teach informal (professional) proofs, even in CS and pure math. They expect you to learn by osmosis.

Interested in proofs and proving? Read Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs by Richard A. De Millo (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Richard J. Lipton and Alan J. Perlis (Yale University) given at POPL3. https://ucsd-pl.github.io/cse-130-230/fa18/papers/demillo-so...

The peer review process often seems to fail when proofs are involved--reviewers often skip over the proofs because reading and checking is hard work.

FYI, that link gave me a 404. I found what appears to be the same paper here: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf

This volume is, in many ways, much more approachable. Definitely more fun. It is basically a puzzle book. Highly recommended!

I learned how to write proofs in 6th grade, with Euclidean geometry. Granted, in high-school and early university I became more comfortable with juggling alternating quantifiers (like epsilon-delta), but it wasn't at any point like the shock everyone makes it to look like.

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