Customer Reviews

Decision Procedures: An Algorithmic Point of View (Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series)

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I am very familiar with the field of decision procedures, but I bought this book to use it as a quick reference and a refresher in certain areas. However, when I read the book I was very disappointed. The only good thing about the book is the table of contents and the list of references. Many important results and theorems are missing. No explanations or derivations of any of the presented results are provided.

I was hoping that this book would be a good introduction (or reference) to the field of decision procedures, but unfortunately, going directly to the research papers is a much better investment of your time (and money).

The following references provide an excellent coverage of the field:

1. "Constraint Processing", by Rina Dechter. This is an excellent reference on Constraint Solving, which is similar to decision procedures, but focuses more on finite-domain problems.
2. "Decision Procedures for Bit-Vectors, Arrays and Integers", Ph.D. Thesis by Vijay Ganesh, 2007.
3. "Searching for Truth: Techniques for Satisfiability of Boolean Formulas", Ph.D. Thesis by Lintao Zhang, 2003.
4. "Efficient Algorithms for Clause-Learning SAT Solvers", M.Sc. Thesis by Lawrence Ryan, 2003.

I'm in the EDA business, and the book gave me exactly what I needed, and in a very accessible way, too. In my case I needed to learn about SAT and about algorithms for handling bitvectors (I will probably need arrays and pointers at some point later on, given the project I am involved in). Many of the things there I assumed I knew (I read some papers in this field and I discuss it regularly with colleagues at work. I also looked at code of a SAT solver), but reading it really organized things for me very well.