Title: Needlessly cryptic; too clever for its own good
Review: This book claims to "make the essentials of the subject accessible to a broad undergraduate audience in a way that is mathematically sound but presupposes no special mathematical experience." On this count, the book fails miserably. The book starts easily enough with an introduction to sets and languages, but by the time Chapter 3 rolls around, the writing degenerates into the hectoring style of Russell and Whitehead... pages and pages of non-intuitive academic proofs, and making simple concepts needlessly complex in the name of Formality. The concepts the authors are presenting are fascinating, but in order to get to them you have to spend way too much time shuffling symbols. By the time we've made it to Chapters 6 and 7 (the good ones) we've lost most of the students in the muddy bootcamp of Chapters 3 and 4.Don't buy this book, and don't use it to teach; the Sipser book is the way to go.
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