Comment by nathan_douglas

(I'm actually set to complete Mathematical Foundations II next week, after completing Mathematical Foundations I recently.)

Thank you for your comment. I had a very nontraditional path to engineering, even in an era of self-taught programmers, and I feel a lot of pain and despair and bitterness and, uh, a vicarious feeling of disappointment, I guess... so discussing this sort of journey does me some good.

> I feel like I learned "Discrete Math", but in the sense that all the lessons were discrete and I couldn't draw connections between them.

Very reasonable takes. I think you're spot on. I do have a lot of trouble with the abstractness and disjointedness of it. I'm hoping that repetition will improve it. So far I'm still struggling with the same things I struggled with in college - combinatorics, for whatever reason, just seems to slide right out of my brain.

By "modularity" I meant that I could squeeze in 10-15 minutes here or there without having to commit multiple hours to a single concept, and that I could take a day off without destroying anything, but that's probably connected to the "discreteness" you mention, without a holistic, oceanic kind of cohesion or connectedness.

I'm actually working on a project now, an educational site that's kind of along these lines but focused on areas of CS I've always struggled with - Lambda Calculus, Type Theory, Lisp, that sort of thing. I think I have some good ideas. I hope I come up with more, because I definitely want to build a rich mesh of knowledge rather than a catalog of disconnected facts and tools without any underlying meaning.