I’ve been going over a lot of old textbooks while studying for my upcoming CS GRE. I forgot how good the Hennessy and Patterson books are. Also I’ve read the dragon book cover-to-cover for the first time (the new edition with the lame CGI dragon on the cover), various parts of TAOCP, and Sedgewick’s Graph Algorithms in C. Time will tell whether I’ve digested any of that.
When I was in the bookstore the other day, I saw Petzold’s The Annotated Turing. I still blame Petzold for the worst book in my computing library, Programming Windows 95. But I needed to fill in some gaps on formal logic and it was 30% off so I thought I’d give it a go. One nice thing is that it presents in full the paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” with corrections inline. I found a number of the annotations on the machines themselves to be superfluous to the original, while the background on Cantor sets and formal logic were absolutely worthwhile. The main problem is that the book sometimes cites large sections of material from another work, which just makes me wish I had read the other work instead. Conspicuously absent from citation but appearing in the bibliography is the mind-altering but lengthy Gödel, Escher, Bach, which in my opinion better tackles the philosophical angles. I give The Annotated Turing a B: nice explanation of the paper but Chuck loses a letter grade for citing his own book twice and for having a Windows tattoo.