The Analytical Engine: An Introduction to Computer Science Using the Internet, Second Edition: An Introduction to Computer Science Using the Internet

by Stuart Hirshfield and Rick Decker

Book Overview

The book explores the nature of computer science and its major topics, from history and systems design to software, hardware, and the effect of computing on society. In prior versions of THE... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0534391591
• ISBN13: 9780534391591
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Course Technology
• Length: 412 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

dominated by the Web

Deckers gives you a concise tour of computer science. Not enough to turn you into a programmer, given the space limitations of the book. But he covers many key ideas in the field. Including Usenet, email, virtual communities [think Second Life], and the World Wide Web. Naturally, he has to explain HTML, as the graphical language of the Web. HTML is so simple that he essentially explains all its important points. Including the crucial hyperlink tag. The book then segues naturally from HTML to XML. Where you can now write your own tags. Immensely flexible and popular. It is only after this, that the book goes into the traditional topics of computer science. The explanations of what makes a programming language. He uses JavaScript as one example of such a language. So you learn about constructs like for loops, if-else and while statements. The book is really dominated by the Web. The pedagogy stresses this.

excellent condition

The book was band new just like the seller said and arrived in a timely manner. I would buy from this seller again.

Very Good, Very Well-Written Book

This book is one of the two texts in FSU's COP 3502: "Introduction to Computer Science" course (a required course in their Computer Science degree). As the authors state in the preface, they "wanted to design a 'CS 0' course that was a true survey course." They did an excellent job. Basically, they start with the assumption that the reader has never turned on a computer in his life and take him through its history, how to use it, what programming is about, and how the hardware works. They even teach a bit of HTML and JavaScript. There's very little I can say that is bad about the book. It comes down to some typgraphical errors, an incorrect web address for the online portion of the book (easily figured out from the page their web address takes you to), and my belief that they took out too many steps in describing computer switches, gates, and circuits. Frankly, I'm amazed that they reasonably went from a neophyte level to a fully-grounded level in one book. I rate it as 5 stars out of 5.

A great starter...

I used this book in my introductory level computer science course. I found this book to be an essential tool in my early undersanding of how computer works in general and more importantly how to develop working algorithms. This book is well designed and easy to read and easy to understand. This book comes with a CD ROM. I believe this is the key feature to this book. On the CD ROM there are emulators of various computer operations. (eg. Compiler tree breakdown, and many other emulators. An Excellent book!