Understanding Computation

Preface

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for programmers who are curious about programming languages and the theory of computation, especially those who don’t have a formal background in mathematics or computer science.

If you’re interested in the mind-expanding parts of computer science that deal with programs, languages, and machines, but are discouraged by the mathematical language that’s often used to explain them, this book is for you. Instead of complex notation we’ll use working code to illustrate theoretical ideas and turn them into interactive experiments that you can explore at your own pace.

This book assumes that you know at least one modern programming language like Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java, or C#. All of the code examples are in Ruby, but if you know another language you should still be able to follow along. However, this book isn’t a guide to best practices in Ruby or object-oriented design. The code is intended to be clear and concise, but not necessarily to be easy to maintain; the goal is always to use Ruby to illustrate the computer science, not vice versa. It’s also not a textbook or an encyclopedia, so instead of presenting formal arguments or watertight proofs, this book tries to break the ice on some interesting ideas and inspire you to learn about them in more depth.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant ...