How to Solve It by George Polya.

Do You Want Your Kid to Be a Robot?, April 7, 2000.
Review by Bill Butler

In fact, do you want to be a robot? I talked to a woman who took a whole semester in computer science and came out learning nothing. She told me this. My love affair with Real Math started with this book in a library. I was reading a book which had a bunch of interviews with the most successful programmers in the world. One was Czech and I do not remember his name. But he was asked the following question. "What in your opinion is the biggest mistake that programmers are doing in their educations or their work today?" He answered, "It's simple. They don't know how to solve problems. At our company, we have some simple books that tell you how to do this. The best is Polya's 'How to Solve It'. It has a little diagram in the back that completely runs you through a series of questions on solving math problems. But even in schools, they don't take this approach. Everything is by rote and repetition! You solve a problem and YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU SOLVED! We have a lot of these little books." The late Isaac Asimov wrote a beautiful little book called "The Realm of Algebra". It's out of print. But he explains the entire realm of algebra in something like 150 pages. The best book I've ever seen about math. Math can be fun. Programming can be fun. But only if you ask Polya's questions in the back of this book. "What do I have to do to make this problem complete?" "What is missing from this problem?" "What could I add to make this problem solved?" A two page diagram in the back. And everybody knows that programming is just "crummy mathematics". BUY THE BOOK! BUY THE BOOK! BUY THE BOOK!. 2 pages in the end of this book and at least 50% of your math/programming problems are down the drain. Buy the books for your son if you are a Betty Crocker. Or your daughter. Or they will end up in the "Valley of the Dead". Solving problems in school for years and years and simply not knowing what they did! Good luck. Oh yes. One last thing. BUY THE BOOK!