From computing to computational thinking.

摘要

This is a nice book, one that I will keep near me, next to Manfred Schroeder's Fractals, chaos, power laws [11 and Mark Levi's The mathematical mechanic [2]. In the "computing" dimension, this book is one of the best quick reviews of computing essentials I have read in many years. Everything is discussed to a varying but well-thought-out degree of deepness, from digital gates to central processing units (CPUs) and random-access memory (RAM); from Boolean logic and number systems to operating systems; from packets to networks; from algorithms in pseudocode and codes to the web, the cloud, and the applications in our smartphones. The discussion does not always follow a hierarchical view from smaller to larger, or from the bottom to the top, nor a historical view following the evolution of computational thinking, but tries to highlight common threads below seemingly disparate themes; for example, recursion is discussed after web services, but audio, video, data formats, data compression, and document markup are discussed in the same chapter. This approach neither affects the pedagogical force of the book nor harms the coherence of the presentation of computing themes. On the contrary, it sometimes makes old-timers like me think deeper about the relative importance that various themes have historically acquired, or makes us draw new conclusions or have new ideas: always viewing things from new angles leads to innovation.