anonym comments on The Popularization Bias - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Wei_Dai 17 July 2009 03:43PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (53)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: anonym 18 July 2009 07:27:04PM 1 point [-]

Michael Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation is an extremely friendly introduction to theory of computation, including complexity theory and computability theory. As opposed to Garey and Johnson, it seems broader and shallower, covering computability theory (incl. space complexity and other non-NP-Complete topics) as well as complexity theory, and probably in a much friendlier fashion. It's one of the few compsci books I've ever read that I would describe as a "page turner": it was so interesting and readable that I couldn't put it down when reading it, and I still like to pick it up from time to time just to reread sections for pleasure.

[The 1st edition is much cheaper than the 2nd edition for anybody interesting in buying ($10-$20 used, versus >$55 used on 2nd edition or $115 new).]