As an autodidact without an “official” CS degree, discrete Mathematics seemed to me like a key area to open up more advanced topics and solve many practical problems in programming. And indeed it helped me on many such occasions (although I am still studying).

I really like the book “A Primer of Discrete Mathematics”[1] by Finkbeiner II and Lindstrom from 1987. It’s a bit old and unfortunately not free but still holds up pretty well and has many good exercises with selected answers.

I will absolutely check out this book though, looks like a more modern approach with interactive exercises and it even is completely free!

[1]: https://archive.org/details/isbn_0716718154

I wish more textbooks, especially free resources like in the link, would be better about providing more solutions. A book with a lack of solutions tends to create a circular problem for me.

Knowing whether my solution is correct or not is dependent on how well I truly understand the concepts. However, if I truly understood the concepts, then I wouldn't need to solve the problem in the first place. How is one supposed to learn without feedback?

The HN community might be interested in the XML-based tech used to produce this book, namely https://pretextbook.org/

What a lovely resource! Thank you, author.

I just wanted to thank all the authors, especially of textbooks, who put their work online, for free. Their dedication shows, and how. It is largely due to these free (and free-ish) resources that many people -- including autodidacts and those with limited resources -- are able to further their education.

Authors - know that your efforts are very much appreciated!

Bit late to the party, but I can warmly recommend "Discrete mathematics with applications" by Susanna Epp. There are a couple of books with similar titles, but the ones by Epp are amazingly well written. An incredible amount of care and attention to detail went into this textbook, and it shows. Excellent for self study.

The Math Sorcerer did a video on an older edition, which is just a lovely ode to the book, the man is in love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPr5-X9nZc4

Like too many discrete math texts, the Characteristic Root Technique for Repeated Roots section does not give a proof of the forumla.

I wish I even liked my field the way the folks who write these free textbooks love theirs.

Ah, my favorite course in uni. It made me pick both math and ai majors; math for formal verification because I like discrete math so much in my first year.

> A PDF of the book will be made available by August 15th.

On the sidebar:

> PDF coming soon

:(

Is discrete maths a good starting point if I was interested in cryptography? Certainly better than analysis right?

Seems pretty cool, especially for being free! I'm taking a discrete math course very soon at UT so this is nice.