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Buy the Knuth book. You can get it used for ~$25 on Amazon, and if it gathers dust or you dislike it, sell it and buy something like Programming Collective Intelligence for some fun motivating problems and to learn Python. In Knuth's book you learn about and work with the details of how computers work that Mathematica handles itself and explicitly hides from you. If you ever wondered, for example, how Mathematica might store a matrix in memory, or why when you evaluate 1/.99999 it returns .00001, but if you add one more 9 to the denominator it returns 1., then Knuth's book is a good one to turn to. Knuth does not use a high-level language to describe computations--instead he uses a made-up computer called the MIX 1009, which has its own machine language. He came up with 1009 by taking 16 of the machines at the time and taking the average of their numbers (360, 650, 709, 7070, U3, SS80, 1107, 1604, G20, B220, S2000, 920, 601, H800, PDP-4, and II) He also points out that you can derive the same number by taking the name as Roman numerals. If that makes you laugh, you will also find it to be a deeply funny book. |