"Most of the structures exemplify what Polya calls the Inventor's Paradox in his How To Solve It: "the more general problem may be easier to solve". In programming this means that it may be harder to solve a 73-case problem directly than to write a general program to handle the N-case version, and then apply it to the case that N=73. "
So, you definitely felt where I'm coming from.
I've only programmed in Python and Perl, and BBC BASIC on my Amstrad NC100, but I've already intuited that procedural languages share more in common than not. So old books are fine, and Cobol and Fortran with bits next to them explaining what they do shouldn't be too hard to figure out :)
Thanks again.
Andrew
On 9/30/05, Danny Yoo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Andrew,
Another book that I enjoy is Gerald Weinberg's "The Psychology of Computer
Programming":
http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/psy.html
because when we write computer programs, we should recognize that although
technique plays a large part in a program, so does the personality behind
the keyboard.
Weinberg's demonstrations of how people's ego come into play during the
creative act of programming are realy eye-openers, and even though the
examples in his book use *gasp* Fortran and Cobol, they're still very very
relevant.
The mathematician George Polya wrote an excellent book on problem solving
called: "How to Solve It". Definitely look at this one; his insights into
problem solving apply very well to computer programming. An outline
summary of his book is here:
http://www.cis.usouthal.edu/misc/polya.html
Hope this helps!
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