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Do you have a book recommendation to help someone read papers. I spent an couple evenings going over MIT course notes on discrete mathematics to attempt to read a paper on Conflict-free Replicated Data Types <http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/55/55/88/PDF/techrep...;

What I would give for a book at that time that would help me translate the following:

    merge (X, Y ) : payload Z
       let ∀i ∈ [0, n − 1] : Z.P[i] = max(X.P[i], Y.P[i])
Into

    def merge(X, Y):
       Z = ... new object ...
       for i in range(len(X.P) - 1):
           Z.P[i] = max(X.P[i], Y.P[i])
       return Z
I eventually figured it out but it was a bit rough trying to figure out what all the symbols meant.


Well… it depends on the paper! Some stuff might need more than a single course of background to fully understand.

For more rudimentary papers, any undergrad course on discrete mathematics should get you started. I personally was forced to read http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susa... - and it's pretty decent.


Thanks for the recommendation. That was one of the text books that I looked at but the sticker shock steered me towards free MIT course notes.


I don't know if it is true about that book in particular, but if I'm buying a textbook as a resource I usually look for the international editions. They sell near identical versions of the books (shuffle the problem sets around) in other places around for much, much less.


Buy it second hand from Amazon - they are much cheaper! ($17)

+1 for the book recommendation - I also have a copy of that.


There is a really nice book trying to teach exactly this (among other things) called "The Haskell Road To Logic, Maths and Programming":

http://www.amazon.com/Haskell-Logic-Maths-Programming-Comput...


available for free, according to

http://hackershelf.com/topic/math/




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