Myself after working through chapters upto 4(I think), did find it full of brilliant exposition of a few approaches to solve a bunch of interesting problems, but I did get a feeling that most of these methods aren't going to directly help with writing real world programs to solve the problems encountered in the wild. To put it in a vague analogy felt like reading a math book that has detailed explanations of brilliant proofs of select theorems, but doesn't fully explain how the proofs were arrived at from scratch, and doesn't describe general methods to discover proofs for as yet unknown problems. "Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming" Van Roy and Haridi, in premise sort of tries to cover that, aiming to describe a sort of 'science of programming', I haven't read too far into the book yet to comment if it delivers on that.