NRR: Good introductory computer science books?

Karma Sutra

It is piqued, not peaked. Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine.

Blow yourself.

I started out with JAVA, and that is supposed to be relatively easy to pick up. They have good general overviews of various languages available on amazon, but they aren't text books. Either way, you are going to have to dedicate some time to this...its quite frustrating having to learn the basics in order before you can actually program something useful.

Do you want to learn the basics of programming, and how to program, or computer science theory? Computer science theory, in general, might be more applicable to your studies in neuroscience.

The best introductory books are by the team David Patterson and John Hennessy.

Introduction to Algorithms, by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest

I thought this might be an appropriate one, especially since you mentioned algorithms. It doesn't rely on knowledge of any specific programming language, which is nice. Still, it might be a good idea to get some kind of "Intro to some random programming language" first, if you have zero experience. Otherwise, you could just dive right in. What's your math background?

Download Microsoft Dot Net Framework

http://www.microsoft.com/NET/

The msft language CSharp is a OOP.

The .net framework is a great dev env.

Tons of getting started info out there.

Quality Software Design requires talent.

I have seen some really shitty designs from some really smart people.

I am not all that smart as you probably can tell from my writing but I can design killer software go figure.

POD

You need to learn to count in binary, count in other base systems, really get into the basics. Learn basic algorithms and data structures. Boolen expressions and logic.

Why on earth someone would suggest learning .net is beyond me.

For a scientific setting, I highly recommend learning Python first. It's free, it runs on any platform (including Windows, OSX, Linux, and many more platforms you've probably never even heard of) and there's a wealth of libraries available. The SciPy and NumPy are very widely used in the scientific commmunity. There's a nice list of other packages on the SciPy website (http://www.scipy.org/Topical_Software)

Honestly, the best way to learn programming is to jump in and just do it. I'd suggest getting an introductory book for whatever language you plan on learning and start working with it. If you go with Python as I recommend, you can even download a good beginner book ('A Byte of Python') for free:

http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python

There are other more advanced Python books for free like this

http://mindview.net/Books/Python/ThinkingInPython.html

(Someone might follow up to this post saying Python is interpreted, so it's slow, blah, blah, blah. But they're wrong. You can always code critical sections in C and use SWIG to generate Python wrappers. Don't worry if you don't understand what I just said... you probably won't ever need to do this anyway.)

If you want to look at some general books on writing computer programs, there are some classics like:

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Progams (again, free at

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

)

- Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls"

[quote]Programmer.... wrote:

For a scientific setting, I highly recommend learning Python first.

Honestly, the best way to learn programming is to jump in and just do it. I'd suggest getting an introductory book for whatever language you plan on learning and start working with it. If you go with Python as I recommend, you can even download a good beginner book ('A Byte of Python') for free:

http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python

There are other more advanced Python books for free like this

http://mindview.net/Books/Python/ThinkingInPython.html

[/qoute]

As a computer science major i back up this guy. Python is a great first language and the free support is all over the internet.

When talking about computer programming there are 2 sides of the story. One is Thinking like a programmer, and the other is knowing the code.

Even if you knew every c++,java,python, etc command by heart, if you did not know how to think like a programmer you couldnt use it. Python is a very easy language to pick up, and when you start writing simple programs with it you will start to pick up "programmer thinking" Once you start thinking like a computer scientist (what a horrible title for a programmer) then all you have to do from there is learn different forms of code.

Oh, and now that everyone knows im a computer programmer, maybe you will relax on my grammer!

The classic book and foundation of programming since the 70's is The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth.

If we're gonna pick scripting environments/languages, I'd go with Powershell for Windows types. It's basically python on a Windows shell. But, it has the advantage of being able to tap into the .NET libraries. Here's a free book by the guy that wrote it:

http://powershell.com/Mastering-PowerShell.pdf

Note, this only replies to follow up answers. Again, if you framed your background, it might help make it easier to answer your question.

Take it from me you can learn all you need to know about Programming and Computer Science w/ out purchasing a book. It's all there online, and actually much better than any book I ever had in college. Did I mention it was free? Also, you can learn just as much w/out a professor than w/out, the only benefit to going to college to get the c.s. degree would be just that - the degree. My professors (and from what I've heard of all my colleagues, theirs as well) pretty much just made you figure everything out on your own, I don't think I learned much from my profs.

There is also a goofy little package (is free) from Microsoft called Small Basic.

If you know the difference between a constant and a variable type you're ready to roll with SB.