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900 pages- is this more of a read through? Or use it when you need it? I definitely have the time to get through it before school begins, but it'll be tough, I

900 pages- is this more of a read through? Or use it when you need it? I definitely have the time to get through it before school begins, but it'll be tough, I'm suspecting. I do like the thought of really diving into areas that aren't covered as much (I hadn't really heard of constraint programming). I also hadn't thought about looking into/testing out other programming languages in order to learn about programming! How absurd is that! I've bookmarked the OCaml O'Reilly book and will try looking into that this Spring, thanks.

silentbicycle 16y ago
The 900 pages of CTM would be a lot to get through before school, if you were reading it cover to cover. (I've only read about 3/4 of it, though I burned right through a big chunk of it in one weekend.) But, it's quite easy to follow, and for many fundamental CS topics, you can probably find a coherent summary in there when your other textbooks are a dead end. It's not going to cover Java API details, and it's weak on some specialized topics (parsing and compilers, for example), but it fits a lot of big ideas into a coherent whole. Other people will recommend SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/), or would have, had this reached the front page. That's also quite good, but a bit more narrow in focus - depth rather than breadth.