Sounds like the tried and true way. I'm always interested in learning about computing history and the people that set up the groundwork. The more I read, the more I find that tech doesn't learn much from its past and we're just stuck with many inferior iterations of the same things.

I found a copy of, Notes On Structured Programming, by Dijkstra. I'm going to start giving it a read tomorrow (it's a whopping 88pg essay).

It seems that Dijkstra did a lot of paper design work because he was programming for hardware that didn't exist in a programmable form yet.