Concrete maths reading notes 1 - ch. 1&2

I got my current copy of concrete maths about four years ago in Shanghai. And now I finally possess the courage and determination to read it. What surprised me is that this book is so accessible and fun for reading. Sometimes I even imagine that if I read it in high school, i could apply “applied maths" as my prime major in college. Chapter 1 starts with recurrent problems which is a major concept in cs courses.

First half of chapter 1 "Recurrent problems" gives you a very important interview skill: "start from simple cases" and try to find a pattern out of it - this is what I learnt from "Programming Interviews Exposed". It works very well. But this is a maths book so generalization method is introduced and also applied to Josephus problem. This is the best texts that connects computer science with mathematics. It reminds me a wonderful part in Sipser's in which how an algorithm is decoded to a Turing machine's language.

Chapter 2 handles all kinds of SUMs. I never knew there are so many interesting facts about SUM - which I considered to be intuitive and not very brain demanding.

So far, nothing is out of knowledge of early years of undergrad. But it is simply fun and amazing.