[recuter]

These are HN favorites, along with K&R - I wouldn't recommend any of them to beginners no matter what their background is.

Instead I'd suggest a good succinct explanation of Big O notation to be digested and promptly forgotten (anybody who studied calculus should have intuition for it anyway, it just nicely ties in to the "cost" of the code they'll produce) and straight to scripting in Python with them. :)

[Zolomon]

K&R is not a good book to learn how to program from. SICP on the other hand is[1], it teaches how to create abstractions among other things. K&R just shows you how C works. Also, this person has a deep understanding in mathematics and should have no problems digesting an introductory book, such as SICP, at all.

[1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/sicp.html

[cgore]

I really like Winston and Horn's Lisp. It actually is written assuming you don't know how to program at all, but quickly moves along into more complex stuff, really showing off what Lisp can do. Winston teaches (taught?) at MIT, and when the book was first written I guess it was still a reasonable possibility that you could be a freshman at MIT in computer science and have never programmed before.

http://www.amazon.com/Lisp-3rd-Edition-Patrick-Winston/dp/02...

[Zolomon]

Interesting book, thanks for the info! Will take a look.

[ufo]

As much as I love SICP I have to say that I think that its biggest power is showing a different way to view programming. Unless you already know the basics its hard to appreciate it.