Essays, not books, but ... everything Ken Iverson wrote: The Description of Finite Sequential Processes http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/DFSP.htm http://www.jso

Essays, not books, but ... everything Ken Iverson wrote: The Description of Finite Sequential Processes http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/DFSP.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/DFSP.htm (see e.g. the concrete implementation of the Simplex algorithm , the hamming code corrector). It shows that, with the right primitives and notation, a lot of things are simple and elegant. It's not an necessarily an easy read (depending on your math level and background), but it is a very rewarding one. Notation as a tool of thought http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm - a longer introduction. Bottom line: a different take on abstraction. It makes a huge difference when you peel most abstraction layers.