Customer Reviews

Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Third Edition

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
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The authors give a good cursory background on knowledge representation within AI. Chapters 7 - 12, present CLIPS syntax and usage. The information in these chapters helped me to develop a simulation involving four intelligent agents, colloborating via a blackboard. The book provides no details with respect to CLIPS object-oriented capabilities (COOL), but this is something that can be learned through CLIP's accompanying documentation. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to know more about expert systems or CLIPS.

The 4th edition has remarkable changes compared to the 3rd edition, which was written in 1990. Almost all the references are highly up-to-date, new trends in the AI field and new applications leveraging expert systems are introduced all through this book. The content ranges from an overview to the technology of Expert Systems, the basic scientific foundation of Expert Systems and the CLIPS tool for implementing expert systems. There are two chapters about reasoning under uncertainty and inexact reasoning, which are the ways the AI systems are heading. Things like semantic web, its advantage and problems are very well sorted out in the first chapter. The authors put a good deal of humour into the text all through this book, the formal logic stuff is not that boring as it usually appears in other book. I wish I had had this book as my first book for formal logic/deduction systems. The mathematical mechanisms for things like resolution/deduction are explained with plenty of well-arranged diagrams and tables to help readers understand better. Every chapter comes with well-designed assignments. An excellent text book for introductory AI courses (I believe a motivated high-school kid will have no problem to understand the book since it is so well written). And also a good reference for those who need to look up basic concepts while engineering expert systems. I'm constructing an expert system at the moment, got this book 2 weeks ago and it's already dog-eared on my desk. For its targeted audience, this book is truly the best-of-breed. Highly recommended.

This book gives a reasonable, detailed and seriuous account on expert system. A detailed presentation of the CLIPS expert-system language, along with the interpreter, is provided.

Excellent for starting work on expert systems as part of integrated software packages.

Gary Riley was, for a long time, a NASA employee whose sole assignment seemed to be to work out the C implementation of the OPS language from LISP to C so that the military could use it. LISP, even the Symbolics LISP machine, was far too slow for practical applications. Dr. Girratano worked with Gary to produce a book that could be used as a text book in classes taught at the University of Houston and could be attended by the NASA personnel. All hand-in-glove situation that worked out quite well.

But, The Book! I have used it to teach many of my classes on AI. The first five or six chapters can be applied to ANY rulebased system. The first two chapters can be read by any person who wants to understand more about AI. True enough, most of the vendors today have directed their efforts to Java, but the speed of CLIPS is now (since about 20008) one of the fastest in the world. The power of CLIPS is unparalleled in terms of subroutines and extensions that have been implemented over the past 20 years by NASA and others.

The CLIPS language is free. The book is extremely inexpensive for a course in AI. My advice is to read it, devour it, consume it and understand it. Unfortunately, after that you won't be able to talk with your companions about AI since they will know very little except If-THEN-ELSE is part of a rulebased system. If you can find a university that teaches this book, TAKE THE COURSE!! If not, read it on your on your own and join a local rulebase group to help you grow. Above all, have fun.

SDG
jco

Just want to learn CLIPS: skip the intro. Just want a first introduction to expert systems: try a different book. Personally I liked: Introduction to Expert Systems (3rd Edition). You know expert systems and want more reading food: Go for this one. It contains endless material and references.

"Expert Systems" is a great tutorial of the C based open source expert system shell CLIPS. It even contains patterns of usage. This part alone is worth the read of this rather expensive book. Also some nice examples of expert systems are programmed in a very instructive way. I liked the implementation of a system with certainty factors (MYCIN style) and the developer implementation of backward chaining in CLIPS (an only forward chaining shell).

The first half of the book is a very thorough overview of expert systems. For each introduced concept the book names nearly all known terms to describe this very concept. For an introduction it is extremely important to name only the most common term and then after some time maybe one or the other more.
Reasoning and reasoning with uncertainty is well covered. Each chapter has ample references. Here again a little more orientation would have been very helpful.

The book itself is nicely bound and printed. It is a pleasure to look at and a little heavy to hold for a long time.

I fully recommend the CLIPS part and I do recommend the general expert systems part as a second or better third book on this topic.

This is a good book to have on one's library for a beginner in the Expert Systems realm.

Note that actual working, production expert systems may be a good bit more difficult than can be covered in a book like this.

Dr Giarratano is (was?) a great professor at University of Houston--Clear Lake. Mr. Riley was an employ of NASA/JSC when they produced this book together based partly on work done at JSC to create the CLIPS rule-based programming language. It has apparently evolved a little over time.

CLIPS is fairly interesting. But I have never used it in a production setting.

The current listed price of this book seems WAY HIGH. ($203.16)

Provided good basic understanding of AI with example program, CLIPS, enclosed( floppy disk), well written with understandable examples

The condition is very good and price is reasonable, however, the shipping period is a bit longer than my expectation.

An excellent text for a first course in Expert systems.