Customer Reviews

The Theory of Computation (Harper & Row Computer Science and Technology Series)

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In the late 1980's, the college where I was teaching was making a move to offer a course in computation theory. I led that move and while I had some experience in the area, a refresher was needed. This is one of the books that I used to carry out that refresher. It begins with a thorough review of sets, functions, digraphs and basic proof techniques. I consider this essential in any text in computation theory as I have always found it necessary to review this material in my courses.
After these preliminaries, the sequence is:

*) Languages and computation
*) Deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata
*) Regular expressions and their equivalence with finite automata
*) Context-free grammars
*) Pushdown automata
*) Turing machines
*) Decidability

The coverage is complete and the exposition is at a level suitable for the undergraduate having had a course in discrete mathematics. When I was moving through it bringing myself back up to speed, I found it very effective in presenting what I needed to relearn. While I currently use another text in my theory of computation course, despite its' age, I could still use this one.