Customer Reviews

Term Rewriting and All That

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

 

 

My main criticism of this book is its title. As a computer science graduate student, I was looking for a somewhat accessible book on the field of term rewriting, and the title of this book made me think it might fulfill my needs. Although the book seems fairly comprehensive, it is very difficult to understand. In fact, I have read several of the papers listed in this book's bibliography and found them more comprehensible. If your math skills are very good, and you prefer equations to english, this may be the book for you.

This is a good book for someone researching term rewriting, but it does expect a certain amount of background information. Also, some times the terminology is a little unfamiliar to me (an undergrad math/computer science senior), but a little digging through the index takes care of that problem. All in all, a good book all around, especially if you are used to mathematical writing styles.

I needed to understand and use term rewriting techniques in my research

and this book fit the bill. It is very well written and essentially

has no typos or errors that I could find (... I may have found one).

So, the quality is very high. The presentation is quite lucid, well-organized

and logical. As to what to expect, just to be clear, this is a serious, concise mathematics

book and so every word counts. To get the most out of it, a reader needs to work

with the ideas in the context of examples. The book could use some more examples

in my opinion but it's always good practice to come up with your own examples anyway

when reading mathematics. It's also good to read other treatments of the same material

and this book's extensive bibliography supports doing that.