Customer Reviews

Logic in Computer Science: Modelling and Reasoning about Systems

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

 

 

The coverage of this book is quite good for what concerns logic in computer science. However, using it as an introduction on logic for computer scientists is probably ambitious because the explanations are rather complicated for undergraduates. A first course on logic and another on AI would not hurt before getting into this one. Too many notions of computer science (syntax and semantics of programming languages, complexity) are needed to fully understand some topics, hence it is better that you already have a broad view of all aspects of computer science before reading this one. As an advanced course textbook to formal techniques in computer sciente on the other hand, this one would do the job.

A lot of good material is covered and in a relatively tight fashion. The presentation of logic is well done, but when getting into the BDDs, the explanations get a little complicated and I personally had to read it over several times before I could make sure I understood what was going on. This book also does not have anything on symmetry, so if that's what you're looking for, there are better books out there. However, this book can hold its own and I recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics of model checking provided they can take handle some of the heavy duty reading.

This book is a good introduction to logic. It is highly readable, not dry. It explains logic in the language of humans, not arcane mathematics, yet it somehow is able to remain rigorous. This makes logic make sense, rather than it being an abstract intellectual pursuit detached from life and other topics.

Half the book is on logic, half on model checking. I've only read the logic part so far, so I cannot compare the model checking treatment to that in Clarke et al.'s "Model Checking."

The logic treatment is not specific to computer science (or at least did not seem to be so, for someone not a student of mathematics and logic), so in my opinion the title is a misnomer; perhaps a better title would be "Logic for People, and Model Checking Too."

Having taken this class at Kansas State University under the author Michael Huth. Reading this book before lecture often left me a bit confused, but after the lectures it seemed to be brought together, but this is my personal experience, your milage may differ. The book has excellent examples and a great introduction to logic and this book, along with great instruction should help you understand better the logical foundations of computer science.

I read this book to learn the basics of model checking, and I found it an excellent introduction. Logic can be a dry and intimidating subject but this text presents the theory in an engaging style. Concepts are always introduced with concrete examples to explain them and to show how they should be used to reason about software. This book is essentially theoretical, there is no presentation of real world uses of the methods.

In my opinion (I refer to the II edition)the logic treatment is fairly complete for a computer science student (anyway it's missing the treatment of Prolog and the relevant logic).This book is also an excellent introduction to Model Checking of Clarke.

There's a black mark on the side of my book, and that's the only minor flaw.