As an undergraduate, I took a liberal arts course that really changed my thinking about programming. If you can believe it, this course was a philosophy course! This course is what brought everything into focus and made me into the programmer that I am today.
What Course Was That?
The course was Symbolic Logic and it was simply a course that showed use the fundamental ways to figure out logic problems. Honestly, the entire class really boiled down to this:
If A = B and B = C then A = C
In the class, we would go over tons of situations and reduce them to logic statements written down on paper in pretty much the form you see above (but usually they started out more complicated). This process of breaking problems down into abstract statements that can be evaluated is what the study of logic is all about.
There was something about learning logic in this way, in its pure form, that really made a lot of sense. Really,
the lesson I learned here is that you need to learn how to solve problems before you can attempt to program a computer to solve problems.
What Does This Mean For You?
If you are early on your path to becoming a programmer and feel frustrated and perhaps distracted by all the glitz of the Objective-C iOS Mac Foundation programming world then you may need to get back to basics. My thought for you today is that you take a detour and learn about pure logic. Take some time to train your brain up in logical reasoning.
How To Train In Symbolic Logic?
The class I took in my university was all lectures, slides and handouts so I don’t have a great book recommendation. However, I would suggest looking up a course on logic at your own university or local community college. An alternative could be this book I found at Amazon: Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking.