My background is theoretical CS (2 of my professors were pupils of Dijkstra and they were quite particular about formal verification as you can imagine) so that helps; it's good for anyone with an interest in this to read books like 'A discipline of programming' by Dijkstra or more modern books about it (and if you really like it, continue on to Pierce who is the types guy and when I read his some of his work the first time I kind of wondered wth we were doing in programming while this guy already figured it out to such an extent ;).

It all starts to make more sense after some of the theoretical basis. I guess; I don't know how much years of writing formal proofs on pen & paper 20 years ago influenced me in reading this stuff.