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Searching for good textbooks on math related to Computer Science I bought two german books yet, but found them not to be easily understandable and not suitable for self-study . German textbooks are always very academic and extremely based on cryptic formula. They're maybe good, if you want a reference, supplementary to your courses in college, but as pointed out above, I'm trying the self-teaching approach a.t.m. .

I am very interested in theoretical Computer Science, but I lack the needed math knowledge to dig further into the subject . Could you recommend me a book, best in english, which would provide me with the basics of discrete math and every other mathematical subject related to CompSci and is easily understandable ? If the book covers more topics, maybe not so essential for CompSci, but is nevertheless good for self-study, I would like to hear about it too.

Sadeq Dousti
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still_learning
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    See: http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/2571/what-kind-of-mathematical-background-is-needed-for-complexity-theory and http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/4539/what-kind-of-mathematical-background-is-needed-for-graph-theory – Dave Clarke Jan 25 '11 at 15:17
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    Also http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/3253/what-books-should-everyone-read is a really nice list. – Hsien-Chih Chang 張顯之 Jan 25 '11 at 15:21
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    Maybe you should say something about yourself (for example, if you just finished high school, if you have studied undergraduate level math before, etc). – Vinicius dos Santos Jan 25 '11 at 15:27
  • I am still going to "Gymnasium", the german counterpart to the high school, but as pointed out above, I read some books about mathematics and my skills in math are probably at a precalculus level. – still_learning Jan 25 '11 at 16:56
  • Probably I need also to concrete my question, I am not only searching for a book, but also an approach of how to learn matc without pain on my own. I find it very hard, to know with which subject of math to start and with which one to continue. – still_learning Jan 25 '11 at 18:10
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    why is this not a duplicate ? – Suresh Venkat Jan 26 '11 at 00:00
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    why is this question not closed? – Alessandro Cosentino Jan 26 '11 at 03:06

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I am not only searching for a book, but also an approach of how to learn matc without pain on my own.

If you learn best from and/or enjoy a good lecture, your best bet is probably the MIT open courseware lectures. They have Calculus, multiple versions of Linear Algebra

I am still going to "Gymnasium", the german counterpart to the high school

Unsurprising, MIT open courseware also has an excellent collection of canonical CS courses that will be helpful for gaining background in CS theory for the high schooler. I worked through the Structure and Interpretation lectures my Junior year of high school, and that was definitely worth the time. There is also an Introduction to Algorithms course.

Of course, there is also a course on exactly what you want -- Math for CS -- but there are no video lectures.

See here: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#electrical-engineering-and-computer-science

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A good introductory book would have a title such as:

Many such titles are available.

Another option is to find suitable material online: a good starting point, which has lots of links, is http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introductory_Discrete_Mathematics_for_Computer_Science.

The other option is to google "Discrete mathematics" and such like, find .pdf files and skim through them to see whether they are at your level. Also the notes of many first year university courses covering discrete mathematics and such topics are available online. Again, google is your friend.

Dave Clarke
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