[jsomers]

I think jlees makes an excellent point, that PE manages to bridge the gap between the basic "hello world" stuff and the more "algorithmic-y" aspects of programming. In my case that was what really got me snowballing toward being a reasonably capable coder.

I do think you have to be excited about discrete math to really plow through the problems, but the nice thing is, discrete math is the easiest kind of math to get hooked on, just because it's not much more than fancy counting.