Mathematica is like the Band in a box of mathematics. Band in a box is a musical sequencer that includes musical styles based from many different musicians. Mathematica is an information system and it contains many functions that have been designed by other mathematicians. I own about 20 Mathematica books and NKS. Mathamtica is usually taught as a broad discussion that covers many different kinds of maths. The problem is that no one is familiar with the University math stars like rock stars and so people don't ordinarily understand how to discuss families of algorithms or math facts. Because Eric's site exists that is very helpful. I think history and math function and facts work together. I would translate what you want to do from regular programming books and ask questions when you get stuck. You could subscribe to like Safari Books online (wait till they offer it for $200 a year and you have access to 9 mathematica books and any language or anything that has to do with computers. Or you could just hunt up mathematica books on Amazon used and pick them up for real cheap. I have a large enough vocabulary to get through most math books so I can't give myself and excuse why I can't pass algebra 2. But I have been trying to put how the Mathematica world operates but this software introduces you to a world and so little of math is understood by most people. I am more interested in the historical pursuts rather than the functionality because my disability has limited me in the past because my vocabulary was so poor but now I have a better idea of what is happening.

You can find the table of contents and index for all of Wellin's books on his website. Here's the link to this for the current textbook: http://www.programmingmathematica.com/front-and-back-matter1.html

What are the differences in coverage and depth between Paul Wellin's 2013 book Programming with Mathematica: An Introduction and his 2016 book *Essentials of Programming in Mathematica? (Aside from obvious things such as that Association was not introduced into the language until 2014 and, I presume, would not have appeared in the 2013 book.)

Hi Aashish, I recently spent some time reviewing introductory & intermediate level introductions to learning the Wolfram Language for a workshop at Oxford. I've posted my recommended learning resources and the notebooks and exercises from the workshop on http://shift-enter.org/

The right entry point will depend on your background. If you already have some scripting or programming experience, starting with the 'Fast Introduction for Programmers' summary will be more satisfying than an 'Elementary Introduction'. After that, I would recommend Wellin's new 'Essentials of Programming' book. Lastly, Mangano's 'Mathematica Cookbook' is a still very useful collection of starting points or 'recipes' to common problems, as is Shifrin's 'Mathematica Programming' for clear and deeper exposition of the WL's underlying concepts. I've linked to all but the Shifrin on the shift-enter site.

Edit: I should add, if you're looking specifically for course material, Wellin offers this, as does Turkel in 'Digital Research Methods', though you may (or may not!) find the latter's emphasis on digital humanities to be a little removed from your own interests.

From the Help menu open Wolfram Documentation. At the bottom you will see an Introductory Book link. Click it to get a pretty good introductory book by Stephen Wolfram.

Then try flying solo by doing mathematics from a simple non-Mathematica book, such as a college calculus book.