* Welcome Paul Orland

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

This week, we're delighted to have Paul Orland helping to answer questions about the new book Math for Programmers.
See the table of contents online.

The promotion starts Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 and will end on Friday, April 9th, 2021

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, Manning.


Image from https://images.manning.com

Please see the Book Promotion page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Posts in this welcome thread are not eligible for the drawing, and should be reserved for welcoming the author. Questions posted in this topic are subject to removal.

[Les Morgan]

IMO, many programmers are under the misconception that they do not need much Math, and that is quite the fallacy.  I am delighted to see a book to promote Math to programmers and especially those that "missed it along the way in their education".

[Henri Kalalo]

Hi Paul, welcome to the forum! So nice to see that you've written a book on math for programmers, these are good skills to have and they are often underrated. Also congrats on writing and finishing a book at all, it must be a daunting task :-).  In your opinion, if you had to pick one out of all, what math skill do you consider essential for programmers?

[Clyde Zundel]

This looks truly useful!  Looking forward to diving in!

[Paul Orland]

Thanks, Henri!

Henri Kalalo wrote:In your opinion, if you had to pick one out of all, what math skill do you consider essential for programmers?

The most important math skill is working with functions!  I like functional programming, so I have a bias, but I think function abstraction (e.g. defining a new function to encapsulate some computation) and function composition (applying multiple functions to a piece of data in order) are the most important ideas in programming and they come directly from math.

I use functions throughout the book to introduce basically every concept.  A linear transformation is a function that takes vectors and outputs vectors.   The derivative and integral are "functions" in calculus that take functions as inputs and return functions as outputs.  Machine learning training algorithms are often functions that take in a data set and output some function that can predict something about future data points.  Functions are everywhere! I can't say enough good things about functions!  

[Stepankha Yuliannia]

Welcome!