in9

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: this helped me understand the different types of recursion; how a problem can be modeled for the code to solve and how those designs can evolve and how the paradigm I'm using (functional or OOP) can help me

- Refactoring: this book helped me understand the different patterns we can use to alter code. Giving them a name and symptoms is a great way to apply and communicate with other coders. I recommend this book to everyone.

- The little Lisper: this really helped me get recursion. Like really. Although I could use a refresher.

- Clean code: look... this book is bad. Like, really bad. But, at the time I read it, and in the languages I used (Python, C, R) we didn't have many rules on how to write and organize our programs. And I wanted to improve on that skill. And this book gave me pointers and made me think about those ideas. I don't recommend it around, because for many people Clean Code can become a dogma really easily. But if you can question and critique and reach out to other resources and is an advanced beginner to coding, I can see this book bringing value.

- An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer by Will Larson: those helped me get clarity on the role of the technical team in an organization. A team that produces code as the main driver of impact in a product/service. I lump them both because I read them back to back and don't remember, exactly, which is which. But une is more focus on a tech leader and the other a tech specialist.

- Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook: whenever I need to interact with some unix technology, this book delivers in terms of giving me a nice historical view and presenting the common tooling around the tool. This helps me interact with stuff programmatically much better. Be it GRUB, X, SAMBA, this book gave me the necessary introduction I needed, much more organized and thought out and with useful references than the average blog post you will find in the wild.

And I'd like to recommend this Ask HN on problem solving books

This is a view that, depending on the lecturer, can be the total opposite of their view. See, many mathematicians don't have this instrumentalist view on math and some even despise it with their heart. They don't care about applications and don't get particularly excited when a problem was solved in another domain with their technique.

Also, solving a particular problem is that, a particularity. They look for generalizations and for rules and methods that can be applied regardless of the domain. That is why weird and contrived examples are the bulk of their logic, since when you look for generalizations, those are the cases where it breaks. Does continuity implies differentiability? For almost all practical cases yes, but when you want to be general, thats when you get the Weierstrass function [1], a weird function that needs to be studied if you want to develop a theory of real valued continuous functions. Yet, such knowledge is extremely impractical for you average engineer or deep learning researcher.

And ok, you might argue that "I'm not at such level, I don't need those particular theoretically interesting cases since I'm not going to study advanced mathematics at that level". Ok fine, I respect that. But that is not part of the "culture" of mathematics (a culture which your lecturer likely comes from). Since the subject is learned and investigated with this "quest for generality which makes us study weird examples" this is how it is passed along, and this is how it is studied and structured.

All that to conclude: I think its best to respect how math is structured. First, it is precisely the type of thought that I think very other applied fields lack, but that actually helps solving problems. It is by seeking generality, and looking at corner cases that stuff gets built. And mathematicians are the best at formalizing those because this is how they advance their craft. Second, and last, its by creating your own investigation and development of examples that you can stride for a more applied and practical version of the course. That way you'll get the most out of the course.