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kristins3's review
5.0
Amazingly well-written textbook. I usually just go off of class lectures and notes but this book was so good that I used it as well. I would highly recommend this to anyone - the subject is very well-introduced and really changed the way I see computation, greatly improving my understanding by seeing it in a new framework
jldavis's review
5.0
Anyone wishes to learn about automata, context-free languages, and Turing machines needs to pick up this book. I'm not even kidding. Sipser is such a clear writer and can describe concept things very lucidly. My favorite thing about this book compared to other mathematical books is that Sipser explicitly gives the "Proof Idea" before delving into a proof. Most people that use proofs are probably familiar with the sensation of finishing reading a proof only to wonder what in the world just happened. This hardly happens in this book.
callan_'s review
5.0
I surprisingly really enjoyed this - the proofs and theorems are usually explained really well, and often there are many examples given to most angles of the proof.
The section I enjoyed the most that did this was probably the proof for the Pumping Lemma for regular languages; there are a few rules to it as well as 3 conditions that must be met, but Sipser chooses a handful of different non-regular languages (for proofs by contradiction) which uniquely explain why each rule or condition is there.
I jumped around a lot and so have not read the book cover to cover, so I cannot speak for absolutely every topic (including some of the advanced ones), but some sections seem rather cryptic compared to others that seem well formulated and, at least if you have a computer science degree, quite easy to read - perhaps if there's another edition or two (it's quite old but it seems Sipser still periodically updates it!) they are smoothed over and the book is made even better.
Great book for the introduction of finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines, decidability proofs, time complexities (big O), languages from regular to recursively enumerable, pumping lemmas, grammars and more!
Also, there's a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine on the cover of this edition which, although I don't really see any relevance, I'm a complete sucker for!
The section I enjoyed the most that did this was probably the proof for the Pumping Lemma for regular languages; there are a few rules to it as well as 3 conditions that must be met, but Sipser chooses a handful of different non-regular languages (for proofs by contradiction) which uniquely explain why each rule or condition is there.
I jumped around a lot and so have not read the book cover to cover, so I cannot speak for absolutely every topic (including some of the advanced ones), but some sections seem rather cryptic compared to others that seem well formulated and, at least if you have a computer science degree, quite easy to read - perhaps if there's another edition or two (it's quite old but it seems Sipser still periodically updates it!) they are smoothed over and the book is made even better.
Great book for the introduction of finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines, decidability proofs, time complexities (big O), languages from regular to recursively enumerable, pumping lemmas, grammars and more!
Also, there's a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine on the cover of this edition which, although I don't really see any relevance, I'm a complete sucker for!
tillchen's review
5.0
THE best textbook regarding the theory of computation. Full of lucid explanations. Recommended for anyone studying CS theories.
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