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I haven't taken any math classes above basic college calculus. However, in the course of my programming work, I've picked up a lot of math and comp sci from blogs and reading, and I genuinely believe I have a decent mathematical mind. I enjoy and have success doing Project Euler, for example.
I want to dive in and really start learning some cool math, particularly discrete mathematics, set theory, graph theory, number theory, combinatorics, category theory, lambda calculus, etc. My impression so far is that I'm well equipped to take these on at a conceptual level, but I'm having a really hard time with the mathematical language and symbols. I just don't "speak the language" and though I'm trying to learn it, I'm the going is extremely slow. It can take me hours to work through even one formula or terminology heavy paragraph. And yeah, I can look up terms and definitions, but it's a terribly onerous process that very much obscures the theoretical simplicity of what I'm trying to learn.
I'm really afraid I'm going to have to back up to where I left off, get a mid-level math textbook, and invest some serious time in exercises to train myself in that way of thought. This sounds amazingly boring, though, so I wondered if anyone else has any ideas or experience with this.
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“It's absolutely not a barrier to becoming a web developer.” According to Web Developer Charlotte O'Hara, it's not only easy to learn to code without having a background in math, but outside of some routine arithmetic, most web development projects don't rely heavily on math at all.
Of course you need some basic math concepts, like calculus or algebra, or logic, but the very basics if it. You don't need to know any of complex numbers, probability, equations, graphs, exponential and logarithm, limits, derivatives, integration, differential equations and so on.
Yes: You can be a 'good' programmer without math and algorithms, provided you don't tackle very complex problems, like machine learning or AI. Pretty much all low and medium complexity programming tasks don't involve too much math or algorithms.
If you don't want to attend a class, you still need to get what the class would have given you: time in the material and lots of practice.
So, grab that text book and start doing the practice problems. There really isn't any other way (unless you've figured out how osmosis can actually happen...).
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