It seems to me that there are 2 types of "Computer Scientist"
One with a more traditional education, including all the tech subjects, plus all the college level math (3 or 4 calculus, 3 or 4 algebras, discrete mathematics, differential equations, etc). I am in this group.
And then the more... I don't know how to call it... "modern education" maybe? which is very light in the math side, and very focus in implementation of the technical side
Computer science is not about computers, nor is a science. But it is about the process of information transformation. While the book shows some of that in Python, a single language is not enough to "Think like a Computer Scientist", what is worse it helps perpetuate a false impression of what a computer scientist do.
I would fall into your latter camp, being self-taugh. I started with the interpreted languages JS, Ruby and Python and, in the end, I didn't feel like I understood what I was doing until I got into C and even Objective-C. Therefore, it wasn't until I touched a pointer or dealt with memory management that I felt like I was really more than a coder.
Not everyone wants to learn C, or C++ for that matter, but at least taking the time to understand I/O and (in my case) POSIX systems goes a long way to writing better programs - even if they are just in Python.
I began as self-taugh like you, but I went from Basic to Assembler in 1 year. I gained a lot by understanding what the compiler was trying to make work, so I agree with you that understanding of lower levels goes a long way into what you produce at a higher level
Then I went to college, and math forced in me a more abstract thinking. I had to make it work in my head, because writing the symbols will not make sense if I could not conceptualize it first. I honestly hated differential equations, but in retrospective, it help me a lot to write functions that create new functions in return, and this is in C# (I don't like the mess that C++ became, but I respect other people that do)
It seems to me that there are 2 types of "Computer Scientist"
One with a more traditional education, including all the tech subjects, plus all the college level math (3 or 4 calculus, 3 or 4 algebras, discrete mathematics, differential equations, etc). I am in this group.
And then the more... I don't know how to call it... "modern education" maybe? which is very light in the math side, and very focus in implementation of the technical side
Computer science is not about computers, nor is a science. But it is about the process of information transformation. While the book shows some of that in Python, a single language is not enough to "Think like a Computer Scientist", what is worse it helps perpetuate a false impression of what a computer scientist do.
Applied Python would be a better title