How to Read This Book

You’ve got to read this book in order. In some books out there you can read each chapter independently and skip around a bit, but this isn’t one of them. Each chapter assumes you’ve read the previous ones, and the book is carefully constructed so you can ramp up your understanding as you proceed.

That being said, there are certain chapters in the latter half of the book that don’t depend entirely on each other. The diagram below depicts which chapters are prerequisites for other chapters.

For example, you could technically skip from Chapter 10 to Chapter 13 if you wanted to. (Oh! And this diagram is based on a data structure called a tree. You’re going to learn about it in Chapter 15.)

Another important note: to make this book easy to understand, I don’t always reveal everything about a particular concept when I first introduce it. Sometimes, the best way to break down a complex concept is to reveal a small piece of it and only reveal the next piece once the first piece has sunk in. If I define a particular term as such-and-such, don’t take that to be the textbook definition until you’ve completed the entire section on that topic.

It’s a trade-off: to make the book digestible, I’ve chosen to oversimplify certain concepts at first and clarify them over time rather than ensure that every sentence is completely, academically, accurate. But don’t worry too much, because by the end, you’ll see the entire accurate picture.