[barrkel]

I strongly disagree that programming is heavily based on mathematics. Rather, mathematical formalisms exist for much of programming, and the better our programming languages become, the more heavily they are based on sound mathematical concepts, because mathematically sound concepts happen to have desirable qualities around consistency and orthogonality.

But simple imperative programming at the level of assembler, for example, I would argue is more closely related to cooking recipes than it is to mathematics. And the reverse mapping of mathematics to programming isn't terribly strong either; most general-purpose programming isn't abstract enough to get big gains from maths.

As a practical matter, I work professionally on compilers - i.e. far closer to the CS end than the glue code end of things - and outside of the usual bits of parsers and grammars and graph theory, I would still submit the only really important piece of CS maths a self-motivated student programmer needs is the analysis of algorithm complexity; big-O notation for space and time, in other words.

All that said, I'd prefer by far students being taught from SICP or CTM[1] than any book targeted at introducing people to a programming language, rather than using a programming language to introduce people to CS concepts. Using practical, industrial languages like Python or Java warps your perspective because in the interests of practicality, those languages are quite opinionated in how you should structure your programs. Things are different with Scheme or Oz.

[1] Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming