Today's gem is "The Science of Programming" by David Gries. It's a book first published in the late 1970's which I'm guessing is one of the earlier attempts at a not-quite-academic publication trying to formalise some concepts of program design, provability and deductive reasoning. It does this for a variety of algorithms in a framework which - and this is a useful point - does not involve in any way an object oriented language, functional language, or anything which hides what's mostly going on under the hood from the programmer. Not that I think those are bad things, but I do think that being taught about how things are done closest to how things are run is a good idea. Starting at OO seems to produce programmers who, well, don't seem to have much of a clue about reality and rely on their tools a lot more than they should.
I'm currently re-reading it with a notebook at hand. Luckily for me, the first few chapters involve propositional/predicate logic and deduction stuff which overlaps nicely with my Semantics course in Linguistics. So it's "almost" related to my university degree. Sort of.
