Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Natural Computing: Basic Concepts, Algorithms, and Applications (Chapman & Hall/CRC Computer & Information Science Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had to get this book for a bio programming course. Overall, I found it to be very useful at explaining concepts clearly. The field was completely new to me but I found the concepts really interesting, and just recently finished reading the chapters we didn't cover. What I found especially useful was the pseudocode that was included in most sections. It was a challenge to convert into python code since I had no previous experience programming with python, but the pseudocode really helped me simplify the complex algorithms. In my course we covered the ant clustering algorithm, genetic algorithms, lsystems, boolean networks, cellular automata, biomorphs, and the game of life. All of these topics were covered in the book and made for some fun projects.

I'm giving this three stars because some concepts were not explained as well as they could have been (for beginners). I spent a lot of time doing online research to be able to write the programs I needed to for class. While the pseudocode was helpful, its variables were not always defined and explained. A lot of us in class understood the concepts but were not able to create working implementations. There were also some problems I ran into (such as overlapping trees in my lsystem implementation) which led me believe I was doing something wrong, when in fact it was just something that the authors didn't explain. It's little things like this that can make programmaing overly complicated, but great technical books explain them in detail.

I have to study about data mining and the professor recommended this book. After reading it, I think it's a great one. No wonder why the professor likes it.