| Here's Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medalist, on the principle of giving examples first: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/my-favourite-pedagog... https://gowers.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/examples-first-ii/ (There are also comments by those who disagree.) I looked at a couple of instances to see how one of my favourite authors, Knuth, explains things. If you look at how he introduces BDDs (Binary Decision Diagrams), it is with an example first: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/fasc1b.pdf#page=8 When he introduces an algorithm for generating all permutations (http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/fasc2b.pdf#page=5), he does not work through the entire algorithm on an example case. However, when he mentions “all permutations … in lexicographic order”, he immediately gives an example of what that means. (In general Knuth is a big fan of the principle of saying everything twice, once informally and once formally; his literate programming paradigm is also an extension of this idea, where first you explain something informally and then write down the code which is supposed to be a precise version of it.) |