Computer Science Books

In an age when computers make ever greater inroads into our everyday lives, well may we ask: Do computers have intelligence? Are they living? Have free will? Exercise moral judgments? Stanley L. Jaki, historian and philosopher of science, deals with these and related questions in Brain, Mind and Computers, a thoroughly documented rebuttal of contemporary claims about the existence of, or possibility for, man-made minds. His method includes a meticulously documented survey of computer development, a review of the relevant result of brain reseach, and an evaluation of accomplishment of physicalist schools in psychology, symbolic logic, and linguistics, and a thorough critique of claims about artificial intelligence.

Comments on the first edition:

"Dr. Jaki's book is the most informed, pentetrating and lucidly written treatment of the subject that I have read anywhere." Robert A. Nisbet, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University.

"Certainly it is rewarding and refreshing to read such penetrating criticism of a field in which gratuitous theorizing and dogmatism are able to flourish bcause our scientific understanding is so small." Sir John C. Eccles, Nobel Laureate, 1963.

"This is a book fascinating in style as well as content...which every scientist should read." Eugene P. Wigner, Nobel Laureate, 1963.

"Dr. Jaki presents a sustained, well-informed, and persuasive argument for mind-body dualism...my own predilections are exactly opposite to Dr. Jaki's conclusions, but I welcome his challenge..." Herbert Feigl, University of Minnesota

[I meant to rate this with 4 stars.]

If you read enough of Fr. Jaki's works, or at least enough of the right ones, you see certain themes emerge time and again. One of the most important of those "Jakian" themes is the irreducible ontological gap between "the quantitative and the qualitative." Fr. Jaki explicitly cites an early source for this distinction as Aristotle (cf. Categories 16a). What makes physics the chief of natural sciences is its ability (sometimes envy-producing for other sciences) to isolate minute areas of material reality and explain them to an exhaustive quantitative degree. However, given the gap between quantities and qualities, this limits physics to quantitative concerns (when physics brings in literally meta-physical perspectives and assumptions, it makes proper use of the realm of qualitative reality). Given the nature of reality, you could call physics the supreme, because supremely limited, science. The disparity between quantities and qualities is the thesis of Fr. Jaki's first book on the history of science, **The Relevance of Physics** (TRP, 1966), its relevance being but the narrowly defined flip-side of its Irrelevance in many areas of life, an irrelevance acknowledged by many of physics' brightest lights.

The quantity-quality theme is also the driving force behind **Brain, Mind and Computers** (BMC). Indeed, Jaki mentions he originally intended to make BMC a closing chapter of TRP, but, upon reading M. Taube's **Computers and Common Sense**, he decided the cognitive/AI issue needed a lengthier, manifold treatment on its own. Ideally, then, BMC should be read in conjunction with, and perhaps only shortly after, TRP. BMC originally (ca. 1969) consisted of four chapters (each averaging 160 footnotes) and an epilogue, but in 1989 Fr. Jaki reissued BMC with a new fifth chapter (sort of like H. Dreyfus did with his **What Computers STILL Can't Do**, though Fr. Jaki thinks not very highly of Dreyfus's phenomenological arguments against strong AI), so be sure you get the newer paperback edition from Regnery.

Not only as a "Jakian" Catholic myself, but also as a believer in academic rigor -- one of Jaki's great strengths -- I am constantly miffed and surprised not to see this book cited in the indices or bibliographies of books dealing with the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. (An exception is D. Hofstadter's annotated bibliography in **Gödel, Escher, Bach**, but even then he brushes BMC aside as mere polemics, albeit with some "interesting" points ... yet he never engages those interesting points.) Certainly BMC is dated in terms of its contemporary analysis of AI. Even so, the gaps it fills in the historical record and the emphasis it lays on key issues -- such as 1) the futility of a physicalist reduction of human consciousness, 2) the important (rather Gödelian) discrepancies between human cognition and computerization (i.e., between language-as-understood and terms as formally describable), and 3) the crucial difference between computational results and intellection per se (i.e., the immateriality of thought per se). This last point deserves some elaboration. To borrow one of Fr. Jaki's own metaphors, just as two rivers may combine molecules when they converge but do not thereby perform addition, as a formal mental operation, so a computer may produce an algorithmic solution without thereby grasping the problem. The immateriality of intellection is understood by Fr. Jaki in terms of all words being universals and all meaningful discourse being predicated on methodical realism.

For these reasons alone, BMC should not be so consistently ignored by supposedly well read scholars in the field. The praise the book earned when it first appeared, coupled with the status of its author, should make BMC more prevalent in the discussion, even if only as a matter of academic thoroughness. BMC should remain especially significant in the AI/cog-sci debates since it is argued in tandem with TRP, a book no scholar of science can do without reading.

Of course, I am inclined to believe that, despite his accolades on a formally academic level, the priestly collar so proudly worn around Fr. Jaki's neck has led, even if unconsciously, to chronic disparagement of him on a personal level, moreso than some academics might care to admit.

Works that could profitably be read with BMC include:

M. Adler's **The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes**
M. Adler's **Intellect: Mind over Matter**
J. Maritain's **The Degrees of Knowledge**
E. Gilson's **Linguistics and Philosophy**
E. Gilson's **Methodical Realism**
M. Taube's **Computers and Common Sense**
S. Jaki's "The Brain-Mind Unity" (Real View Books pamphlet)
S. Jaki's **The Relevance of Physics**
J. Ross's "Immaterial Aspects of Thought" (available via JSTOR)

Breakthrough IT captures the essence of what your IT organization should be doing. The first few chapters break down the operating modes of most IT organizations, allowing the reader to identify their starting point, and contrast that with the author's concept of what IT should look like. The remaining chapters provide a fairly detailed "blueprint" of how to migrate towards this new IT organization. What I liked about this book is that unlike many other IT management books, it is not targeted exclusively towards techies. A CEO would be very comfortable reading the book and using to evaluate how their CIO and IT shop are performing, and using the book to trigger discussions and changes in both to make IT a stronger contributor to the company.

Breakthrough IT provides a great template on moving your IT organization from the old way of doing business, to what the author calls "Breakthrough IT." Basically it is an evolution from a cost-focused IT shop that is constantly trying to lower costs, to an IT organization that uses technology and process experience to generate returns. Each chapter builds upon the next, going over the transition to this new way of doing business in a very clear manner.
The book was easy to read, with executive summaries and action points in each chapter, which have proved helpful in discussing its points with peers and figuring out how to apply what I just read. It should prove helpful for C-level people and upper management that are tired of the "old way" of managing IT. I found the interviews with various C-suite exeuctives to be very insightful, and provide some real world examples of organizations that are at various stages of implementing the Breakthrough IT concepts.

Broadband Entertainment is an excellent book. It gives a thorough explanation of both the trends in home entertainment and the digital technology that is making them possible. It is written in a very interesting style and covers material ranging from the generations of entertainment and distribution technology to the politics of broadband access and digital rights management. There are also a lot of interesting tidbits about some of the technical details, such as audio and video coding, capacity of storage technologies, etc. This book is worth the price for its large, informative, full-color illustrations alone.

I found this book to be extremely packed with many of the details that flood the digital entertainment and gaming world. It is a very useful reference as well as an extremely easy read that itself entertained me while providing clarification on many aspects of the confusing technology in the broadband world. This book can save you literally hundreds of hours that you would spend trying to find this kind of information online and in reference books. It ties all of this together into a comprehensive whole that is very accurate and on the mark.

Most students who have taken a semester course in compiler would agree that a semester is too short even for just building a compiler, not to include the time used to learn the basics like parsing. This book is a good start at where your course left off. It covers many interesting and modern topics on building an _optimizing_ compiler, a compiler that generates compact and speedy code.

As a comparison to the Muchnick one, this book is slightly less advanced but contains sufficient details to start one in this field. This book also excels in its clear and informative explanations.

An interesting feature of this book (and also Muchnick) is that no concrete code/implementation is included. The focus is on the concepts of building an optimizing compiler and the theory behind code optimization, not exactly on how to build one (from scratch) using whatever programming language. The reader must come up with the implementation side of the story if she wants to apply the techniques to her own compiler.

As a final note, this is not an introductory book on compilers. If you want one, go find the classic Dragon book (by Aho, Sethi, Ullman) or the newly written work by Appel.

This book just has it all. As the title suggests, this book is all about compiler optimizations. Don't expect to find anything about lexical analysis or parsing here, but that is exactly why I like this book so much. It is aimed at people who are familiar with the basic structure of a compiler and with data structures and algorithms.

The book describes the various phases the intermediate language of a compiler goes through before the final assembly or object file is written. It discusses such things as SSA form, lazy code motion and its application to load and store motion, scheduling, register allocation, etc. Important concepts, including (but not limited to) correctness, dominance, control dependence, and availability, are discussed and explained in detail. Algorithms and data flow equations are given with a proof and a clear explantaion. But this is not an algorithms cook book like Muchnick, the best part of this book is the synthesis of all the algorithms and ideas.

There are only 3 drawbacks of this book. First of all, Morgan assumes that the target is a RISCy machine with a reasonably orthogonal register and instruction set. Second, the framework he presents is sometimes a bit unconventional. For example, his discussion about register allocation presents Chow&Hennesey priority bases graph coloring, but it forgets to give a proper comment on Chaitin/Briggs style coloring. Finally, the book exclusively describes intraprocedural optimizations.

That said, the basic ideas presented in the book will give you enough references and back ground to understand the differences between Morgan's approach and other approaches to building optimizing compilers.

Building Problem Solvers is a very hands-on introduction to AI systems in general, and truth-maintenance systems in particular. All the systems discussed come fully implemented. In this regard, the book can be viewed as an accessible and detailed discussion of the code. For this reason, the best way to read any chapter is to scan through it first, then, carefully go through it again with the source code in sight.

The authors were PhD students of Gerry Sussman at MIT. Thus, this book is a great way to learn about the classic AI systems and techniques devised and refined at the MIT AI lab.

If you get serious about the book, you'll want to try out a few of the exercises. I found that the exercises are invariably insightful, though I wish some included implementation hints, because elegant solutions are often far from obvious.

In short, I highly recommend this book if you're looking to build some problem solver using proven AI techniques.

This book is very rewarding to study and put into practice. I had a lot of fun immersing myself in the concepts and systems developed in this book. Using the techniques of this book as a base, we've implemented BioHacker, a debugger for metabolic networks.

This book takes you on a journey through the techniques that have been used to build problem solvers, ranging from classical search techniques to Assumptive Truth Maintenance. It is very easy to read, despite the high level of technical detail. The LISP code that accompanies the book is well documented, easy to understand, and it works. It is a must have for anyone who truly wants to understand problem solving techniques.

This book give you a company perspective of how to delivere web-based training, doing a deep and detailed analisys about cost-benefit, diferent typical pricing models,... I think that this book has a valuable information for yours research of implementing web-based training in your company.

Online Learning Magazine reviewed this book in the September 2000 issue, comparing The Business Case for Web-Based Training (Tammy Whalen and David Wright), Return on Investment (Jack J. Phillips), and The ROI of Human Capital (Jac Fitz-Enz).

"Tammy Whalen and David Wright's book, The Business Case for Web-Based Training, is based mostly on examples. They outline the practical business reasons for Web-based training, compare Web delivery with traditional training delivery, and help management decide if the money spent is worth it. They provide a case study as an example, then invite trainers to use that model to evaluate their own Web-based training."

Whether you have enjoyed the previous book "Calendrical Calculations : The Millenium Edition", or you do not care for that book's theory, you'll love this one because you get to see the results, laid out in clean crisp typography, with many small details (holidays, moon phases, ...) that make this book a pleasure to use as a reference. Well worth the price.

Whether you have enjoyed the previous book "Calendrical Calculations : The Millenium Edition", or you do not care for that book's theory, you'll love this one because you get to see the results, laid out in clean crisp typography, with many small details (holidays, moon phases, ...) that make this book a pleasure to use as a reference. Well worth the price.

In September 1997 we needed a book on Category Theory for our first year undergraduate class in the B.A. (Mod) honors degree in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland. This book was at that time the only one that satisfied our requirements. Now we have chosen (Lawvere and Schanuel 1997) in addition. It is our opinion that one ought to start with the latter, a most excellent introduction of great profundity, and, for application to computing, use the Walters text. It is hard to beat this combination for a first year undergraduate course, as far as we know at this time (Sept.98)

The Book begins with the plain definition of a category, as does any other book. However, it points out a category as a kind of (abstract) Data Type. Distributive Categories are discussed as a milestone for developing the basic concepts in computation, as those of imperative programs and Data Types. The Book has a lot of examples (from computation) and the author took care of drawning conclusions from them before develop an abstract framework. The concepts of automata and automata with inputs are shown (the later in a functorial category). Grammars and Graphs are discussed as well. The book has a very good introduction to the concept of freeness and adjunctions. Its latest chapter treats the computational category theory in the context of Knuth-Bendix procedure. The exercises present in the book are great !! They guide the student gradualy into deeper questions without any frustation. There are very easy exercises which have the only goal of finding out ones undersating of a new definition.

Thank you I needed the book for a course i took
ordered it after the first class had it by the 3rd class
thanks

Nicely put together, easy to follow steps trough the titorials.

The Cisco Press "CCSP Self-Study: Cisco Secure Intrusion Detection System" is the Cisco Authorized self study book for the CSIDS Exam 642-531 (ISBN: 1587051443). The book is an excellent resource for any individual pursuing the CCSP track. In fact, I used this as my primary training material to pass the CSIDS Exam 642-531 to compliment my CSIDS web-based training.

The book format follows the CSIDS training course. However, the book provides far greater detail than the tradition Cisco courseware. The book follows the standard format similar to the majority of the Cisco Press Authorized self study books. Part I reviews the basics of Network Security; if you already passed some of the other CCSP exams, such as the PIX or SECUR exam, you can probably breeze through this section. Part II begins the deep dive into the CIDS environment, reviewing IDS concepts, Cisco's IDS architecture, and the various Cisco IDS platforms. The third section of the book delves into IDS configuration. Not only does the book provide detailed information on configuring the IDS sensor and modules, but also the various switch configuration requirements and the differences between IOS and Catalyst OS. The remaining sections cover CIDS maintenance and management.

Cisco Press provides numerous screenshots and configuration examples throughout the book. For those CCSP candidates who can not afford to invest in a 4200 IDS Sensor, a Layer 2/3 Switch, and CiscoWorks VMS, the diagrams, tables, configuration examples, and screen shots are very helpful in grasping the concepts and configuration requirements.

Where the book truly excels is in its coverage of both the IDS signatures as well as using the IDS Management Console (a component of CiscoWorks VMS). Fifty pages are dedicated to the IDS signatures. Admittedly, my eyes got a bit heavy reading this chapter. However, understanding the IDS signature architecture is paramount for any Network Admin. The coverage of the IDS MC was also fantastic. After completing the book, I felt confident in my abilities to utilize not only the IDS MC, and also the Security Monitor component of VMS.

The only instance where the book seemed lacking was coverage of the IDS Network Module for the Cisco Routers. However, in defense of Cisco Press, it is nearly impossible for a Cisco book to remain 100% up-to-date on Cisco latest hardware and software releases. The book does provide some content on the Cisco Secure Agent (CSA). Any CCSP candidate should always check www.cisco.com for the latest exam requirements and augment study material with the latest hardware and software releases from Cisco's website. All in all, I strongly recommend the Cisco Press "CCSP Self-Study: Cisco Secure Intrusion Detection System" for Cisco CSIDS 642-531 exam preparation.

I read this book over 4-6 weeks and must say its one of the best technical reads I have come across, the level of accuracy if 100 % and there are few errors even worth mentioning, it has loads of quality examples and the flow is brilliant, I don't keep many of my books but I will keep this one, highly recommended for all security engineers. Thanks Ciscopress for publishing a really high standard security manual AWESOME.