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Michael (Massachusetts Institu Sipser

Michael Sipser

Introduction to the Theory of Computation 3rd Edition

by Michael Sipser (Author)

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Gain a clear understanding of even the most complex, highly theoretical computational theory topics in the approachable presentation found only in the market-leading INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF COMPUTATION, 3E. The number one choice for today's computational theory course, this revision continues the book's well-know, approachable style with timely revisions, additional practice, and more memorable examples in key areas. A new first-of-its-kind theoretical treatment of deterministic context-free languages is ideal for a better understanding of parsing and LR(k) grammars. You gain a solid understanding of the fundamental mathematical properties of computer hardware, software, and applications with a blend of practical and philosophical coverage and mathematical treatments, including advanced theorems and proofs. INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF COMPUTATION, 3E's comprehensive coverage makes this a valuable reference for your continued studies in theoretical computing.

ISBN-10

113318779X
ISBN-13

978-1133187790
Edition

3rd
Publisher

Cengage Learning
Publication date

June 27, 2012
Language

English
Dimensions

6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
Print length

504 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The text meets my objectives very well. The author presents the material in an appealing manner, making a hard subject accessible and intuitive to the students. He manages to do that while maintaining the rigor and formalism that the subject warrants. The book has a lot of information packed in it, and can serve as a reference book for students interested in research in theoretical CS."

"As one of my students puts it, the book is 'fun to read and helps him learn the subject better'."

"This is a model for readability, with sensitivity for what students find difficult."

"Excellent prose (simple and succinct) with very good diagrams. It is by far the best presentation of automata in the business."

About the Author

Michael Sipser has taught theoretical computer science and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the past 32 years. He is a Professor of Applied Mathematics, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the current head of the mathematics department. He enjoys teaching and pondering the many mysteries of complexity theory.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cengage Learning; 3rd edition (June 27, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 504 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 113318779X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1133187790
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.65 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #72,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13 in Machine Theory (Books)
- #183 in Computer Science (Books)

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

474 global ratings

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4 star		15%
3 star		7%
2 star		2%
1 star		7%

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Ian O.

This book saved my life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 4, 2023

Verified Purchase

But only because the course that used it was actively threatening it. If you want to learn computational theory, this is a great textbook. Some pages requires quite a bit of time to fight through, but that's the nature of the topic. This is also a different edition than you are probably looking for that, according to the cover and copyright information, seems to be utterly illegal to sell in the US. Yet Amazon passes blame.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 18, 2023

Verified Purchase

The cover has marks all over it and there are some printing errors on some of the pages.

Helpful

Andrew Oliver

First Thoughts: Very Mathematical; A Deep Treatment Of This Subject; Up To Date Too

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 14, 2013

Verified Purchase

This is a book I would recommend to third year university computer science and third year university pure mathematics students. Rather terse in style densely packed with challenging content, I really will have to take time to read it carefully to fully appreciate it.

In my Bachelor of Science at the University of Melbourne years ago I studied some related content in a subject entitled 618-341 Mathematical Logic, and did not take the computer science subject 622-301 Theory Of Computation. Now, from the mathematician's point of view finitism is irrelevant it's a matter of axiom systems being consistent and proving things. The Godel number encoding of theorems and interiority arguments and clever free variable substitution arguments together with model theory were used to establish as true many powerful results ...

I note that the terminology has changed since 1982; what was called then 'a recursive formula' is now called Turing decidable and what was called then 'a recursively enumerable formula' is now called 'Turing recognizable'. For example, this author would regard a Turing machine that took a blank tape and churned out the binary representation of pi 3.14159265358979323846 etc in some tape representation to an infinite number of places as a Turing machine that loops, even if such a Turing machine was reasonably well behaved in terms of its generally moving forwards ... This begs the question of real number representation; the bit string 0.11111111111 ... is essentially the same real value as 1.0000000000 ... This suggests to me that Turing theory has taken a more finitistic turn; whether this is to avoid paradoxes recently found I haven't worked out yet. In the real world with its quantum mechanics randomness and lack of apparent finititude it's quite concievable that a multi-tape Turing machine (as described in outline in section 3.2 p176ff) device could resolve a real number function evaluation so as to avoid a value ending in an infinite series of 1's that rightly should be rounded up, and store the real value as a constant in some 'set' device for storing real numbers ... However till we know more about the real truths underlying physics this is mere speculation ...

There are a lot of topics that are quite new to me. For example, P less than NP less than PSPACE less than NPSPACE less then EXPTIME seems a rather more complex hypothesis regarding algorithms and their expected time to complete than I've met in other works ... Reading this section I hope will prove rewarding ...

Overall it seems that the field has moved on since 1982 in many a way and I hope this book enables me to refresh my knowledge with the latest results. An excellent treatment of the whole field of theory of computation.

The only criticism I can think to make is that this work seems to have a finitistic philosophy rather than a mathematical Platonist philosophy ... but then this is essential to the computer science approach rather than a pure mathematical one ...

8 people found this helpful

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EJS

Not detailed enough

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 12, 2014

Verified Purchase

Given the fact that this is considered one of the "standard" reference books, I was surprisingly unimpressed with this book.

There are a number of complaints I have about this book:
1. Its price is just obscene - the fact that they would charge that much for a book that a lot of people are forced to purchase is just wrong on the face of it.
2. The lousy price is especially irritating given what you get for it. Fact is, even at a much lower price this textbook would be a bad value. At a mere 480 pages, this is not an especially long textbook; not sure how the publisher can possibly justify charging an above-average price for a shorter-than-average textbook. There's really nothing I can think of that would justify this book's price tag; it's not like they add some fabulous feature (software package, etc.) that makes this book worth the extra money. I suppose it's more of a "they charge it because they can" type scenario.
3. Not only is it overpriced, it's not even particularly well written. Quite bluntly, the book's relatively short because it doesn't explain anything.

With regards to the third point, I completely agree with the other reviewer who commented that this book is written as if you already understood the material; this is exactly what he does. I had to consult other textbooks all the time in order to be able to solve the book's problems because I found the author's explanations inadequate. It's almost like the author had a minimum word count and he was struggling to meet it ("OK, just 10 more pages to go before I can release it").

On the plus side, the problem sets are, for the most part, decently selected if you have decent reference material to help you with them (e.g. a different textbook, a good professor); if your professor's not that great and all you have is this book I pity you, the book is of some limited help in solving the problems I guess but you'll need a LOT more, especially if you're not already really familiar with this material.

I guess this book could be pretty helpful for review or reference if you already know the material, but overall it's not so great for learning the subject for the first time, especially if you're stuck using it as your primary learning source.

25 people found this helpful

Helpful

Matthew D.

I guess if you need it for class...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 9, 2022

Verified Purchase

Try to go without it.

The information in the book seems to be accurate and well organized, but if I were to make a list of textbooks that were overpriced, this one would be at the top. The author or publisher should be in jail for how ridiculously overpriced this is (even as a used copy, brand new is robbery).

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Joshua

This is a great intro to complexity theory

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

This is a great intro to complexity theory, though expensive for my tastes. I bought it for an autonama class, never read it during the class, but came back to it for the special topics.

This only dips into the special topics, but introduces many of the important classes, and their relation to other complexity classes. Such classes as L, BPP, IP, Alternating, NC, and of course P, NP, exptime, PSPACE, and more.

It is very well written. It ussually explains the proof ideas before starting, and gives detailed proofs. If you can afford it, this book makes a great intro to complexity theory.

However, this is an intro. This book does not discuss advanced topics in depth, just enough to understand the most common comexity classes and their known relationships.

12 people found this helpful

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SimonH

Just what I needed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 20, 2019

Verified Purchase

Just what I needed to support my Computer Science Masters Degree - clearly laid out, easy to follow and pitched at the right level

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 9, 2017

Verified Purchase

Great book to get a broad, yet deep introduction to the theory of computation.

Archit Bohra

It is a great book to - START YOUR THINKING JOURNEY

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on February 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

It is a great book to - START YOUR THINKING JOURNEY...Michael has, in this book, taught in a way which I've always wanted to be taught. NOT JUST SPOON FEEDING. He makes us THINK.

PROS:
1. Has Mathematical Rigor.
2. Makes you THINK LOGICALLY...
3. A Decent Sized Book.
4. Huge No. Of Exercises.

CONS:
1. Not as COMPREHENSIVE as Ulman. (but why compare!)
2. Makes you think HARD...if you want to. (but isn't that great?)

If you haven't yet started with Theory Of Computation, I'd recommend this as the FIRST book.

7 people found this helpful

Khaled K

Great book at a reduced price.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 30, 2019

Verified Purchase

It's pretty much the international edition of Sipser's book, I believe. So, the content of the chapters is exactly the same.
I haven't looked at the end of chapter questions/problems, but I'd heard that they might be a little different compared to the original version. Something to look into. As for the book, the content is solid and nicely and easily explained for the most part. It also has good examples.

In some parts, he could go have dug deeper into the material, but I understand that this would have made the book much wider and bigger. But yeah, good book. I'm not sure I could have found a better/equally good one.

All in all, a very convenient option for people on a budget. The pages are a little thin, and their quality isn't great, but it's nothing you can't get over. It's the compromise that you make by buying the book at a reduced price.

Very professional and courteous seller. I had a problem with the shipment, and the seller was very helpful in solving the issue and always replied promptly to my message. Thank you very much bookshut. I would recommend to friends.

Thiago

Theory of computation

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on September 22, 2021

Verified Purchase

O livro é excelente em conteúdo porém o formato Kindle contém problemas de formatação

One person found this helpful

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