Books Recommendation: Breaking down a problem into sub-problems (in general)

[oberver]

Whenever I have a problem (in general) to solve which I have not seen before or solved before, I find it difficult to approach and break down into small subproblems and then I start procrastinating and avoiding the problem.

I would love to know your approaches/experiences. It would be great if you could share how you learned the art and can also recommend related books.

Thanks!

[csnewb]

Problem Solving 101 by Ken Watanabe provides a toolbox of problem solving techniques. One method I've been using to decompose problems us to use a "logic tree". Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_tree. Another technique is to first explain the problem and solution at a high level (pretend you're explaining it to a friend or coworkers), then write pseudocode for how you would solve it, and then convert that pseudocode to actual code.

[oberver]

Logic tree is a good direction to look into. I asked the question in a broader sense, not just coding.

[markus_zhang]

I think it depends on context, assuming you are not talking specifically about competitive-programming. I'm actually also very interested in this question as I found myself, as a self-taught programmer, has difficulty transforming a real-life problem into a computational problem, and then breaking it down to smaller ones.

[auslegung]

It may help to search for "problem decomposition", that's the more technical term that I'm aware of. You'll probably get better results googling for that.

[yesenadam]

I never had that problem..but can recommend Polya's unique How To Solve It, which deserves its high reputation, and might be helpful.

But which particular domain(s) are you talking about?

[oberver]

Thanks for the book recommendation.

Not any specific domain but I was mainly looking for ideas/perspectives on how people think about and approach problems in general. This would be useful for me when I am on to something new (at least for me) and test out different approaches when I hit the wall or feel stuck.