[adrianmonk]

Logic was an important piece of the puzzle for me when I was learning. When I started my CS degree, I didn't have this, and some of the courses were extremely helpful in building it.

If you are a very math-oriented person, you might expect that people already know this. But it's not true. We are not born with innate knowledge of it.

I'm talking about stuff like basic propositional logic, maybe a little first-order logic, definitely some boolean algebra, and maybe some Hoare logic.

You might not have to or want to get too formal or hardcore with it, but it really helps to at least have some basic grounding in the subject.

Before I had that grounding, I would spend a lot of effort trying to get code working, but it was often a jumble that I couldn't sort out. The conditions in my if statements were a mess. My loops wouldn't terminate, or I couldn't figure out how to write them.