You could always try the backdoor approach. Maybe try reading a few recreational books on computing such as The Tinkertoy Computer and The New Turing Omnibus to

You could always try the backdoor approach. Maybe try reading a few recreational books on computing such as The Tinkertoy Computer and The New Turing Omnibus to familiarize yourself with some of the concepts then perhaps swing back to the hard stuff with a proper textbook like Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik.