Customer Reviews
'Theoretical Computer Science at 10,000 feet' - By: , 25 Jan 2003 
As the author says, the members of the research community of Computer
Science have done their discipline a disservice by not making any
special efforts to write accessible accounts of the field, as a result
of which the 'layman' still has little idea of what goes on 'under the
hood', so to say.
He has therefore undertaken the challenging task of presenting the basic
ideas underpinning Computer Sciencein a way that's easy for the general
reader to grasp. He sets out to present the essential notions of
Algorithms & data structures, Turing machines, Finite state machines,
Decidability, Computability, Complexity, NP-completeness, Correctness,
Parallel algorithms, Probabilistic algorithms, & more with a minimum
of mathematics & yet without sacrificing intellectual rigour - and
most admirably, succeedsin doing so.
David Harel is a big namein Theoretical Computer Science, one of the
leading researchers, & chairman of the Applied Mathematics and
Computer Science Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
What made my mind up about reading this book were the strongly encouraging
remarks on the back cover by Aho & Hopcroft, two of the foremost authors
and researchersin the field, who've written some great textbooks themselves.
This book presents all the basic fundamental ideas of the theory of computation,
using as little maths as possible. Yet, the intellectual rigour is never
compromised, which means that the reader truly gets a flavour of how a
Computer Scientist thinks, & how much fun it can be.
It also shows you how certain problems cannot be solved cheaply while others
cannot be solved at all (solved exactly, that is), no matter how much
'computing power' you have - ie theory proves the existence of certain
fundamental limits on the problems that we can hope to solve.
The writing is exceptionally good - like a true master of his subject,
Harel makes concepts seem easy to grasp, though you may find that later
on, you realize it was quite a subtle notion that was discussed.
The illustations are a great help, & occasional humour provides relief
from all the thinking you'll be doing!
Even though it's written for the general reader, it is also useful for
programmers, systems analysts & designers, software engineers and
students, since Harel cuts to the core of the concepts & offers
valuable insights into the theory that they might already know.
Allin all, this book covers amazing ground & is a great introduction
to algorithms & the theory of computation. For probing further, you'll
need mathematics & textbooks, but this an excellent starting point.
Detailed, but heavy going - By: , 09 Dec 2002 
It's certainly true that this book goes into a lot of detail about computer science theory. Unfortunately, it is almost all theory, often with little attention paid to the relevance of the topics covered. It can also be rather heavy & hard to follow at times. Overall, I'd say it would be of interest to those studying computer science theory, but perhaps not of much value to those more interestedin practical applications.
