| I think in theory, it's fantastic - the basic tenets of computer science are really fascinating, even abstracted away. I may look like an adult, but it's just a disguise. It may be that the sample chapter wasn't representative of the rest of the book, but I found it a bit confusing. From an admittedly quick read, I got: - commentary on jargon
- a mention of red-black trees
- reference to the Traveling Salesman Problem What I found confusing is that if you have no grounding in CS, you wouldn't even catch the references - they don't seem to play a real part in the story. If the traveling salesman were trying to find the shortest route to visit everyone, and had been trying for years and years and years on his own, and some days found one that was just a little bit shorter, and it was just enough hope to keep him going...the idea that figuring this out is difficult or impossible is at least well-explained. I'm sure my algorithms teacher is upset by this, but I've completely forgotten how red-black trees work, and I didn't get a better understanding from that chapter. I'm not trying to be an armchair critic, and I certainly like the story, but from this particular chapter I'm not completely clear on how it explains CS concepts. |
There's a (very early) draft of a later chapter available: http://carlos.bueno.org/2011/01/tortoise.html
I do not actually explain red-black trees in the book, nor most of the things the Jargon say. There is a lot of ground to cover and I stuck to the stuff I understand best.