Pdf of EOP from the author's site if you want to judge for yourself: http://elementsofprogramming.com/eop.pdf http://elementsofprogramming.com/eop.pdf I think

Pdf of EOP from the author's site if you want to judge for yourself: http://elementsofprogramming.com/eop.pdf http://elementsofprogramming.com/eop.pdf I think the book is great. For example in chapter 3, it explains how you can write an exponentiation algorithm for numbers and then reuse the same code for implementing matrix exponentiation. Why does this work? Because numbers and matrices have similar algebraic structure! Identifying useful reusable structure is exactly what generic programming is about. I think abstract algebra is highly underutilized in programming and this book is a reasonable intro to the topic if you're a C++ developer (though there are much better resources if you switch to functional programming languages).