Customer Reviews

Introducing the Theory of Computation

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I am going to start by suggested that there are two types of people when it comes to judging books on automata - those who think that mathematical notation makes a subject easy to understand due to its clarity and succinctness and those who are not helped appreciably in their understanding by mathematical notation. Even though I teach computer science at the college level, I am one of the later people. I find the overwhelming majority of my students are among the later as well.
I am teaching an automata course for the second time this fall. While I used the Goddard book my first time around I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything, so I spent the summer reading automata textbooks. Now I'm going to use the Goddard book again because it's the only one I've found that I think will make sense to my students. Goddard manages to explain automata and grammars in English and then provide the minimal amount of mathematical notation that's required to deal with the field. This is the only book I've read that manages this. Just go ahead click on the look inside and look at the first pages of the book. They are quite different than other automata textbooks.
It's not a perfect book. The sections on complexity (N <-> NP) are too short. It makes no real effort to explain parsing. I would prefer using the Chomsky hierarchy as an organizing technique rather than an afterthought. But, for the non-math reader it is far the best for the basics of automata theory that I've been able to find.
Even if this book is not assigned for your course you may want to read it to get an understanding of the topics.

There's not too much I can say about this book other than my Professor required that I buy it. That being said, it's fairly understandable considering the subject it covers.