whenning@ucsd.edu writes:

>   
>   
>   Although I've of course Googled around for potential books to
>   select, are there any ones particularly suited for someone in my
>   position?
>   

In my opinion, a splendid book that's full of insights into
computation and languages and how to solve problems is Abelson and
Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (MIT
Press).  

It uses Scheme, which has the infamous parentheses, but really those
aren't as bad as you think.  In fact, they're a syntactically minimal
way of writing programs, which doesn't get in your way when thinking
about problems.  An outstanding Scheme implementation is PLT Scheme
from Felleisen and his colleagues, now at Northeastern.  

Having taken a tour through Abelson and Sussman, you're sure to feel
at home in OCaml or other functional languages, and probably look at
programming in any language with a clearer pair of eyes.  

        Joshua 

-- 
	Joshua D. Guttman		<guttman@mitre.org>
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