Customer Reviews

Mathematical Logic for Computer Science

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This book covers many logical subjects for computer science in an interesting largely repeating sequence of chapter subjects. There are 12 chapters, 2 appendices, a notation index, and a subject index packed into this compact 318 page book so it moves fairly fast. Check the contents in the Amazon 'Look Inside' utility to see what is included. While being a great reference in its subject, this book is officially strongly targeted at undergraduate computer science students and might not be much of a viable read for non-computer scientists.

Nevertheless, the more I look at this book, it grows on me. There is good general coverage of 'traditional' mathematical logic in the first 7 chapters, and most Prolog algorithms are in separate chapter sections called 'Implementation' with a capital P superscripted at right of the word. Prolog code is always in plaintext. 12 of 67 subsections of the text or 19% of them are followed by the * symbol, indicating that they are especially difficult sections. Another subject at end of the text is very new to me and quite interesting and that is temporal logic with its various time operators.

A link to the excellent smaller book I bought with this one, which I fully read in Nov11: Logic for Computer Scientists (Modern Birkhäuser Classics)

This book is a very well written introduction to quite a few areas of logic.
It treats propositional logic, predicate calculus, resolution, logic programming,
Hoare logic, the Z specification language, temporal logic. It is concise yet packed
with useful results. It has a particularly clear and short exposition of semantic tableaux,
which is just a great, meaningful, and easy way to prove (or disprove!) theorems
in the predicate calculus. On the downside, it has essentially nothing to say
about equality, which is a major disappointment since equality is just so important
in practice.