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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 004
EAN num: 9780130279613
ISBN number: 0130279617
Label: Prentice Hall
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 207
Printing Date: June 23, 2000
Publishing house: Prentice Hall
Sale Popularity Level: 196354
Studio: Prentice Hall
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
This book focuses on fundamental issues of computation. The readers can master the content and gain lasting perspective from which to understand computers by carefully worked out examples, illustrations, and algorithmic proofs. Teaches the fundamental concepts behind computation. Hundreds of exercises marked according to the level of difficulty provide readers ample opportunity to apply concepts. Hundreds of illustrations which enhance understanding. Only algorithmic proofs are given in the text allowing readers to calibrate the mathematical depth they want to pursue. Appropriate for upper division undergraduate and graduate level courses in Computer Science Theory, Theory of Computation, and Automata and Formal Language Theory.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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the book was alright...i could have used a few more visual examples and the title of the book is really funny. i had a great teacher so the book's shortcomings were not as noticeable and did not effect the learning process. but overall a pretty good book.
Rated by buyers 
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The fundamentals of computing is not only critical to the understanding of how computers can be made to do things, it is also fun to do. In my experience, students quickly pick up the basic operations of finite automata and Turing machines. It is also very easy to make the step to applicability, in that parsing problems are easily expressible as finite automata. With all this simplicity, there is a lot of power. Turing machines are considered equivalent to digital computers, and that is the point that is most difficult to get across. Students understand that computers are complex machines, so they often find it difficult to comprehend that these simple abstractions consisting of a paper tape and transitions can model the behaviors of advanced computers.
A course in the theory of computing is now a universal requirement of the computer science major and to be effective the students must be convinced of the power of automata and Turing machines. This book succeeds in that area. Requiring only that the students understand the basics of sets, relations and functions, there is a brief, yet thorough coverage of finite automata, grammars and Turing machines. The last chapters cover undecidability and computational complexity. A set of problems is given at the end of each chapter and they are very good. To solve them, it is necessary to do a bit of thinking and apply one or more of the concepts introduced in the chapter. One characteristic that I found appealing is that there is no overkill of examples. Some of the books I have seen in this area give so many examples that the redundancy dominates the originality. There are few examples, so one is hard pressed to find anything that could be considered redundancy.
This book is shorter than most covering the theory of computing. However, there is enough to fill a semester course, so if you are in need of a textbook, this one may satisfy your needs.
Rated by buyers 
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the only thing that is good about this book is that its small. Thats it. Price is super high like its made of gold. Honestly, I found it very hard. I read chapter 1 for several times and I couldn't understand the last part of it. Anyone who reads this book has to have someone to help, eg. Teacher or a T.A. The authors just assume that we have previous knowledge about everything. Material is not well explained. It would be much better to google any topic to get a better explaination with examples.
Rated by buyers -
To make my review useful, I have to say I was a teaching assistant using this book for one semester with 50+ students. I read the book from cover to cover (multiple times), solved most of the questions at the end of each chapter, graded the students' solutions, and much more.
I have to say, this book is a failure.
pro: the book is small, easy to read (but I doubt you can easily understand)
con: too many typo! I picked one hundred, at last, I gave up.The presentation is not clear.
I recommend "Elements of the Theory of Computation (2nd Edition)
by Harry R. Lewis (Author), Christos H. Papadimitriou (Author)" as the introductionary book. However, if your instructor picked this book, sorry, you have to buy it. :p
Rated by buyers -
This thin book is very easy to carry anywhere but the content of the book is not really satisfactory. I had to buy another similar book to understand some parts of this book. The problem exercise
parts are good. They have some good problems but when I get stuck on a problem, I had to open a different book to review before going on to a subsequent problem. This book seems to assume that the most readers of this book already know what this book is talking about. This book may be suitable for those who already have enough knowledge on the theory and want to review and refresh the knowledge that they already had before.
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