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Title:
Models of Computation&Formal Languages
Author:
R Gregory_Taylor
ISBN:
0 19 510983 X
Publisher:
OUP
Pages:
667pp
Price:
£52-50
Reviewer:
Francis Glassborow
Subject:
languages; reference
Appeared in:
10-3
These are two deeply theoretical books that I expect in these
days of watered down first degrees are at second or third degree level.
Relatively speaking in my day I would pitch them at the level of third
year undergraduate special subject (i.e. electives) choices. You need a
sound mathematical foundation to tackle either. This makes it
particularly ironic that someone has thoroughly messed up the preface to
the Savage book. It states that the book is in four parts, goes on to
describe a book in three parts and though it has the chapter titles
correct it attributes them to the wrong parts of the book. This lack of
attention makes me wonder just how much care was taken over the rest of
the book. While my maths and computing theory is up to reading books such
as these, it is not up to the level where I can validate technical detail.
I have to trust the author. The state of the preface leaves me feeling
insecure.
Those responsible for the design of the machines we use should be
familiar with the material covered. I bet many are not. The detailed
consideration of trade-offs between space and speed are revealing. The
entire theoretical framework exists to tackle issues of caching, multi-
level caching etc. all the way down to use of secondary storage. Of
course studying this sort of material is hard work and way beyond what
anyone could expect of the working programmer. However knowing that the
material exists allows us to be more critical of the inadequacies of many
designs. We may not have the time to determine the answers for ourselves
but we no longer need to accept the excuse that no-one knows how to do
that.
I wish I could justify a greater depth of discussion of the relative
merits of these two books but neither space nor the interests of most
readers can justify that. If I had to choose between the two books my
vote would go to Gregory Taylor's. His English is just that much more
readable. However either would be a valuable study for those aiming at
mastery of Computing Science.