Delftse Foundations of Computation - 2nd Edition
Stefan Hugtenburg
Neil Yorke-Smith
Copyright Year:
ISBN 13: 9789463665988
Publisher: TU Delft Open
Language: English
Formats Available
Conditions of Use
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA
Reviews
I found the book to be concise and thorough. It covers logic, proofs, sets, functions and relations. The method seems to be more towards CS/EE majors, which is what we would like to see. read more
I found the book to be concise and thorough. It covers logic, proofs, sets, functions and relations. The method seems to be more towards CS/EE majors, which is what we would like to see.
Content is accurate and error free.
The relevance is up to date for a logic book. I am no mathematician, however, it seems to fit very nicely for a CS course on logic.
The author is more clear than previous books I have read on logic, which tend to drive right into proofs of logic. The fundamentals are brought up and addressed, and then the reader is shown examples. I find the book a good read compared to others.
The text is consistent within itself. I found no changes in composition or style.
The text is fairly modular. Like other mathematically oriented texts, it builds on itself, so that has to be taken into account in terms of its modularity.
The book is well structured. Moving from logic to boolean algebra to circuits to predicate logic works very well in this text. From there it moves to proofs and sets, functions and relations. This seems to flow very nicely for the reader.
The text interface is well done. The side notes are well placed and informative. Perhaps I have a personal bias, but I so squirm slightly when I see a wikipedia reference in a textbook. This would be my only negative, but I am unsure if any undergraduate student would call this a negative.
The book seemed to be free from grammatical errors.
While the book is certainly not offensive in any way, and I am located in the U.S., the books examples do reference items in the Netherlands. I do not in any way find this offensive, and many in the tech fields are U.S. centric to a detrimental point. I would argue that the authors use of the references actually enhances the book as the U.S. readers may be more curious about the origin of the reference, and go investigating, which will actually prompt more learning, which is a good thing.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: Introduction and Learning Objectives
- Chapter 2: Logic
- Chapter 3: Proof
- Chapter 4: Sets, Functions, and Relations
- Chapter 5: Looking Beyond
- Selected Solutions
- Further Reading
- Index
About the Book
DELFTSE FOUNDATIONS OF COMPUTATION is a textbook for a one-quarter introductory course in theoretical computer science. It includes top-ics from propositional and predicate logic, proof techniques, discrete structures, set theory and the theory of computation, along with practical applications to computer science. It has no prerequisites other than a general familiarity with computer programming.
This book is derived from Foundations of Computation by Carol Critchlow and David Eck, Version 2.3 (Summer 2011), which is licensed under CC BYNC-SA 4.0. Critchlow and Eck are not associated with the TU Delft editions. This book also uses some material from Wikipedia (English) (en.wikipedia. org), which is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The authors of the TU Delft editions are responsible for any errors, and welcome bug reports and suggestions by email or in person.
Thanks to M. de Jong, T. Klos, I. van Kreveld, F. Mulder, H. Tonino, E. Walraven, and all students who reported bugs or provided exercise solutions. This work can be redistributed in unmodified form, or in modified form with proper attribution and under the same licence as the original, for noncommercial uses only, as specified by the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncsa/4.0/).
About the Contributors
Authors
Stefan Hugtenburg holds a MSc in Computer Science from the Delft University of Technology, where he now teaches in the undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering programme. He is involved in all courses of the Algorithmics track in the curriculum, starting with this book and the course Reasoning & Logic, up until the final year course Complexity Theory.
Neil Yorke-Smith is an Associate Professor of Algorithmics in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at the Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on intelligent decision making in complex socio-technical situations, with a particular current interest in agent-based methodologies and behavioural factors in automated planning and scheduling. He teaches Reasoning & Logic and graduate courses in Artificial Intelligence.