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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Can Novices Jump Directly in C? (Books)
Message-ID: <15155@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 11 Feb 91 08:20:58 GMT
References: <1991Feb9.042957.20160@athena.mit.edu> <1991Feb8.221802.22573@hellgate.utah.edu> <ENAG.91Feb10063530@holmenkollen.ifi.uio.no>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 21

In article <ENAG.91Feb10063530@holmenkollen.ifi.uio.no> enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes:
>... I was not able to find any
>material which would enable her to read about any of these topics with
>the intent to understand their nature rather than their minute details.

Such books do exist.  The one I most liked was Ted Nelson's "Computer
Lib/Dream Machines", in its original form (not so much the recently
issued new edition).

Your concern is a standard problem for the "technical" disciplines;
introductory textbooks invariably assume that "somehow" one has already
made an irreversible commitment to study hard to become a professional
in the field, so they plow into details with insufficient motivation.
The books that try to serve as "X for Poets", on the other hand, try to
avoid using even the level of mathematics that is supposedly taught in
our public schools, even when there is no good substitute for some
simple mathematics.  Thus a large segment of the non-technical populace
comes to think that the technical areas proceed by the same sort of
fuzzy reasoning that dominates their fields, leading to such absurdities
as taking "it hasn't yet been shown that doing Y does not destroy the
ecology" as all the evidence they need to condemn doing Y.