Hi. I'm a junior in high school who has essentially run out of computing courses. I took Computer Science AP freshman year (got a 5 on the AB exam) and have the opportunity to perform an independent study in some topic this semester. The question is what area of study to pursue. Ideally, any topic will have a textbook available, be easily self-taught, and be something that will benefit from being able to devote 50 minutes/day to it. This means that another programming language would not be a suitable topic, since I can learn that over the Internet (and yes, I've already learned Python :-p). I have identified the following textbooks as possibilities and was wondering if anyone has comments or suggestions: Introduction to Genetic Algorithms Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science Applied Cryptography Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the LISP book) I'm leaning towards Concrete Math, but I'm concerned that it might be too hard (I'm currently in Calculus BC, which means I'll essentially be taking Calc II concurrently with the independent study). Does anyone have experience with this textbook? Also, if anyone has any other suggestions that aren't on this list or opinions on these textbooks, that would be wonderful. Thanks in advance. -- Jacob Lee (ArthurDenture) <alphac@flashmail.com> Digital signature attached. If it's not signed, it didn't come from me. Would you send all your mail on postcards? Un-encrypted e-mail is just that.
If you are leaning toward Concrete Mathematics, I would recommend that you begin with Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming," vol.1 - Fundamental Algorithms. It is not so purely mathematical and applies the mathematics. I also recommend it for the numerous worked exercises of rated difficulty. This will provide many more opportunities for structuring and managing your self-study, and also telling how well you are doing. The application to the analysis of algorithms is the next great part. If you don't like the idea of learning the MIX machine (which you don't *have* to learn to get value from the books), you might get on Knuth's Web sites and take a look at the modern machine MMIX, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.html Also, you might find an opportunity to be one of the people that reviews and converts exercises for this new machine. Finally, if you want more mathematically-oriented algorithms, you can take a look at the work being done on Volume 4, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html#vol4 which includes many modern areas of computational and algorithmic development. -- orcmid ------------------ Dennis E. Hamilton http://NuovoDoc.com/ mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org tel. +1-206-932-6970 cell +1-206-779-9430 The Miser Project: http://miser-theory.info/ AIIM DMware: http://DMware.info/ -----Original Message----- From: edu-sig-admin@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-admin@python.org]On Behalf Of Jacob Lee Sent: Saturday, January 11, 2003 19:18 To: edu-sig@python.org Subject: [Edu-sig] Independent study topic? [ ... ] Introduction to Genetic Algorithms Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science Applied Cryptography Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the LISP book) I'm leaning towards Concrete Math, but I'm concerned that it might be too hard (I'm currently in Calculus BC, which means I'll essentially be taking Calc II concurrently with the independent study). Does anyone have experience with this textbook? Also, if anyone has any other suggestions that aren't on this list or opinions on these textbooks, that would be wonderful. Thanks in advance. -- Jacob Lee (ArthurDenture) <alphac@flashmail.com> Digital signature attached. If it's not signed, it didn't come from me. Would you send all your mail on postcards? Un-encrypted e-mail is just that.
participants (2)
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Dennis E. Hamilton
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Jacob Lee