[galeaspablo]

> Even teachyourselfcs[1], with it's focus on teaching computer science, has no recommendations for a theory book at all.

I am interested in knowing more about this. Could you expand on why you don’t think any of those books are theory? If it isn’t too much to ask can you mention why each one of the books recommended for the different areas aren’t “theory”?

[rifung]

I THINK the commenter was referring to the Computational Theory or Complexity Theory of which they do indeed have no recommendation (Sipser is the common one).

[bashmydotfiles]

@galeaspablo, sorry I should have been more clear. What I meant is basically the comment above. I highly recommend "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" by Sipser.

As I mentioned in my original comment, I barley passed Calculus. CS Theory is still math, but just... without numbers. The class felt more like solving puzzles, if anything. Writing proofs and doing homework was fun. I regret renting the book, I'm thinking of buying it just to work on the exercises within.

[galeaspablo]

Thanks for the clarification. I think teachyourselfcs is a great resource, and having gone through some of the books and seen their rigor (references everywhere, theory that has taken millions of hours in dissertations/papers/patents/peer review), I would have taken issue with not labelling the resources as part of the theory in the field. After all I am sure CS coursework generally cares about algorithms, data structures, relational databases, operating systems, discrete mathematics, networking, distributed systems, etc.

Will be adding Sipser to my reading list.