Learning D for a non computer science background person : pre-requisite knowledge?

[Meta via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Tuesday, 2 December 2014 at 16:38:34 UTC, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:
> While I have been a programmer for close to 23 years, it's been 
> mostly API level code cobbling work.
>
> Would like to learn "D", but am a bit intimidated by the fact 
> that I don't have much of a grasp over the foundational stuff 
> (discrete mathematics, machine organization, etc.) and hence am 
> preparing for the same.
>
> Would like to know if there be anything else I should work 
> through before approaching "D" via Mr. Alexandrescu's book.
>
> Thanks.

An interesting thing about D (that C++ shares to a degree) is 
that it is sufficiently high level that you can write programs 
while knowing nothing about the underlying machine. At the same 
time (again, like C++) it is sufficiently low level that you have 
full access to the machine's capabilities if you want to use 
them. If you want to write an operating system in D, you will 
need to know about machine organization. If you are writing a 
command-line utility to process text, you don't need to know or 
care about the specifics of the underlying hardware.