Delftse Foundations of Computation (2018)

Reviewed by Robert Minvielle, Technical Operations Director, ULL on 11/2/19

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

I found the book to be concise and thorough. It covers logic, proofs, sets, functions and relations. The method seems to be more towards CS/EE majors, which is what we would like to see.

Accuracy rating: 5

Content is accurate and error free.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The relevance is up to date for a logic book. I am no mathematician, however, it seems to fit very nicely for a CS course on logic.

Clarity rating: 5

The author is more clear than previous books I have read on logic, which tend to drive right into proofs of logic. The fundamentals are brought up and addressed, and then the reader is shown examples. I find the book a good read compared to others.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is consistent within itself. I found no changes in composition or style.

Modularity rating: 4

The text is fairly modular. Like other mathematically oriented texts, it builds on itself, so that has to be taken into account in terms of its modularity.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The book is well structured. Moving from logic to boolean algebra to circuits to predicate logic works very well in this text. From there it moves to proofs and sets, functions and relations. This seems to flow very nicely for the reader.

Interface rating: 5

The text interface is well done. The side notes are well placed and informative. Perhaps I have a personal bias, but I so squirm slightly when I see a wikipedia reference in a textbook. This would be my only negative, but I am unsure if any undergraduate student would call this a negative.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The book seemed to be free from grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

While the book is certainly not offensive in any way, and I am located in the U.S., the books examples do reference items in the Netherlands. I do not in any way find this offensive, and many in the tech fields are U.S. centric to a detrimental point. I would argue that the authors use of the references actually enhances the book as the U.S. readers may be more curious about the origin of the reference, and go investigating, which will actually prompt more learning, which is a good thing.

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