Ask HN: What book to read to get a footing in CS theory?
Go ahead and get your free copy of Avi Wigderson's Mathematics and Computation <a href="https://www.math.ias.edu/avi/book" rel="nofollow">https://www.math.ias.edu/avi/book</a>.<p>Broadly speaking there are two types of "CS Theory":<p>1. "What is computation and what can be computed?" That's what Wigderson's book is about. Complexity theory.<p>2. "What's the best way to compute something?" covered by "Introduction to Algorithms" and the like -- sth people ask on interview questions. In addition to the references here, <a href="http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~laci/17discrete/" rel="nofollow">http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~laci/17discrete/</a> gives some good puzzles to work through.