The book is a kind of guided tour of the basics of computing science. The stations are context-free grammars, a notation for non-deterministic imperative programs, regular expressions, integrated circuits, recursive descent parsing, the halting problem and formal proofs, some programming heuristics, efficiency of programs, functional programming, program inversion, a collection of nice algorithms, concurrent programs, basics of compilation and the construction of a processor. Overall, the book is very well written. What is puzzling me a great deal though is the particular (non-)order in which the subjects are arranged. This entails a substantial amount of jumping back and forth. Also, unless readers are equipped with extremely good memory, they will find that by this arrangement many topics from earlier chapters have been forgotten by the time they are referenced in later chapters. Although the author seemed to intend the book as an introductory text, I find many of the remarks fully understandable only when the reader already has a considerable understanding of the subject. For such readers, however, the book is a source of interesting and unconventional views and examples and as such quite refreshing to read. It will provide excellent background material for all kinds of courses, in particular, since it contains a vast amount of useful exercises, many of them with detailed solutions. Let us be greatful that the author managed to leave his book to us in completed form. It shows that by his untimely death in 1994 Computing Science has lost a great mind.
Reviewer: B.Möller (Augsburg)