Product Description

The aim of this textbook is to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to the basic theoretical models of computability, and to develop some of the model's rich and varied structure. Students who have already some experience with elementary discrete mathematics will find this a well-paced first course, and a number of supplementary chapters introduce more advanced concepts. The first part of the book is devoted to finite automata and their properties. Pushdown automata provide a broader class of models and enable the analysis of context-free languages. In the remaining chapters, Turing machines are introduced and the book culminates in discussions of effective computability, decidability, and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Plenty of exercises are provided, ranging from the easy to the challenging. As a result, this text will make an ideal first course for students of computer science.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #344960 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Customer Reviews

Definitely an excellent book.
This book has been a great surprise to me. Initially I thought that in about 300 pages (excluding homeworks and exercises) I could not find all I could need for an Automata, Languages and Computation course. I was wrong, definitely. The book is coincise, but also rich and precise.

The material is very well chosen, and the writing stile is directly thought with students in mind. Kozen has a pluri-annual experience in teaching at Cornell University, and it seems he has developed an effective style of communication with students, that's perfectly reflected in his books.

Some important topics are present in this book and not in both Sipser and Hopcroft-Ullman. If you need (as I did) to learn about Myhill-Nerode Relations and Theorem, this book features the best account I've seen (the other, much shorter, reference can be found in the first editon of Hopcroft-Ullman but not in the second one !).
A nice shot of the Lambda-calculus is also featured, and this too lacks in the other two books.

The organization in lectures is a very good idea when studying. Lectures are carefully cut and self-contained, so that you can organize your time using this unit, and wherever you choose to stop a study session, you always stop at correct boundary of a topics.

As a further (and important) note, the notation used is very clear and elegant. As soon as you get used with it (very soon since its clarity) it becomes very stimulating. Don't understimate this value, since many books feature too-hard-to-follow notations, or no notation at all. Both of which cases are to be avoided, INMH.

I have used other books for my course, starting from both the editions of the Hopcroft and Ullman, but one way or the other I found myself always with this book (and Sipser's) in my hands.

An absolute choice to learn automata theory
The presentation is in an exceptional style of self contained lectures instead of chapters. Apart from the basic lectures, 11 supplementary lectures that cover special topics in the subject and several exercises make the book an IDEAL TEXT. I feel this recently published text is an excellent and an absolute choice to learn automata theory bit by bit, lecture by lecture!

A very concise, well-written exploration of the field
As an undergraduate who has been lucky enough to be taught by Dexter himself, I would say that this book is a good representation of how organized Kozen is, and how he can make seemingly difficult-to-understand problems, simple to even the most ignorant reader. There is no fluff in this book--a blessing to an undergraduate in Computer Science these days. Overall, an excellent text.