LewisELEMENTS OF THE THEORY OF COMPUTATION, 2ND EDN

An Outstanding book for TOC. CS students must buy.

Good

Book is overall good but you will face difficulty in understanding concepts as the language used is hard and concepts are not cleared. I just opened this book for just 2-3 times till now. Prefer some Indian author's book.

The best part of the book is Turing Machines, where the authors introduce the notion of procedures that makes it several times easier to design Turing machines and get a feel of their power. Further, the authors seamlessly establish the equivalence of different models viz. Turing Machine, grammatical computability, and recursive function theory.

Bought the book from Amazon and it turned out to be paperback instead of hardcover. Couldn't return it as it was needed right away but felt pretty cheated, the book was expensive. I paid for hardcover and got paperback instead. The contents of the book itself is what was expected, no problem there.

I enjoyed this book because I enjoy formal mathematics. This is not an applications book, but a formal study of the mathematics that underly algorithmic design and analysis. I'm no math wizard, and I found this book readable (but I had to take it very slowly). The course for which I bought the book only covered chapters 1 - 4 and glossed over the final 3 chapters, but I intend to read the rest over the summer between semesters because it's so well and thoroughly written. This book is *dense*. I had to re-read everything three times before I absorbed it all, but ultimately I've understood everything I've read. The hardest parts to understand were the formal "proofs by induction" on the lengths of strings and sets - and, as any math student knows, you can gloss over the proofs on the first reading. A lot of the formal definitions (finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines, context-free grammars, etc.) baffled me on the first reading, but after reviewing the examples and working through a few problems, I could go back, re-read the formal definition and understand it.My principal complaint with this book, and the only reason I gave this book a four-star review instead of five, is the same complaint I have with a lot of other textbooks - there are no answers for any of the problems (nor can I find a supplement or a study guide or any help anywhere). Given the nature of the problems themselves, it's impossible to verify your answers. This seems to be a trend in textbooks, and it's extremely frustrating. I plan to self-study the last half of the book in the next few months, but without a self-study guide, I'm pretty much out of luck if I can't solve a problem.

1)The book I got is having the headings in some other language along with English which isn't there in the original book.2)Also the size of the book is very small and the letter size in the book are very small which is not there in the original book.So I am not satisfied with this book.

Had some pencil marks around some of the problem sets, but otherwise in fine condition.