Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective

Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective PDF Author: Edsger W. Dijkstra
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 146125695X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Research Fellow, my life has been very different from what it had been before. The daily routine changed: instead of going to the University each day, where I used to spend most of my time in the company of others, I now went there only one day a week and was most of the time -that is, when not travelling!- alone in my study. In my solitude, mail and the written word in general became more and more important. The circumstance that my employer and I had the Atlantic Ocean between us was a further incentive to keep a fairly complete record of what I was doing. The public part of that output found its place in what became known as "the EWD series", which can be viewed as a form of scientific correspondence, possible since the advent of the copier. (That same copier makes it hard to estimate its actual distribution: I myself made about two dozen copies of my texts, but their recipients were welcome to act as further nodes of the distribution tree. ) The decision to publish a se1ection from the EWD series in book form was at first highly embarrassing, but as the months went by I got used to the idea. As soon as some guiding principles had been adopted -preferably not published elsewhere, as varied and as representative as possible, etc.

Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective

Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective PDF Author: Edsger W. Dijkstra
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 146125695X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Research Fellow, my life has been very different from what it had been before. The daily routine changed: instead of going to the University each day, where I used to spend most of my time in the company of others, I now went there only one day a week and was most of the time -that is, when not travelling!- alone in my study. In my solitude, mail and the written word in general became more and more important. The circumstance that my employer and I had the Atlantic Ocean between us was a further incentive to keep a fairly complete record of what I was doing. The public part of that output found its place in what became known as "the EWD series", which can be viewed as a form of scientific correspondence, possible since the advent of the copier. (That same copier makes it hard to estimate its actual distribution: I myself made about two dozen copies of my texts, but their recipients were welcome to act as further nodes of the distribution tree. ) The decision to publish a se1ection from the EWD series in book form was at first highly embarrassing, but as the months went by I got used to the idea. As soon as some guiding principles had been adopted -preferably not published elsewhere, as varied and as representative as possible, etc.

The Origins of Digital Computers

The Origins of Digital Computers PDF Author: B. Randell
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642961452
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
My interest in the history of digital computers became an active one when I had the fortune to come across the almost entirely forgotten work of PERCY LUDGATE, who designed a mechanical program-controlled computer in Ireland in the early I ':ICC's. I undertook an investigation of his life and work, during which I began to realise that a large number of early developments, which we can now see as culminating in the modern digital computer, had been most undeservedly forgotten. Hopefully, historians of science, some of whom are now taking up the subject of the development of the computer and accumulating valuable data, particularly about the more recent events from the people concerned, will before too long provide us with comprehensive analytical accounts of the invention of the computer. The present book merely aims to bring together some of the more important and interesting written source material for such a history of computers. (Where necessary, papers have been translated into English, but every attempt has been made to retain the flavour of the original, and to avoid possibly misleading use of modern computing terminology.

What Computing Is All About

What Computing Is All About PDF Author: Jan L.A.van de Snepscheut
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461227100
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
I have always been fascinated with engineering. From Roman bridges and jumbo jets to steam engines and CD players, it is the privilege of the en gineer to combine scientific insights and technical possibilities into useful and elegant products. Engineers get a great deal of satisfaction from the usefulness and beauty of their designs. Some of these designs have a major impact on our daily lives, others enable further scientific insights or shift limits of technology. The successful engineer is familiar with the scientific basis of the field and the technology of the components, and has an eye for the envisioned applications. For example, to build an airplane, one had better understand the physics of motion, the structural properties of alu minum, and the size of passengers. And the physics of motion requires a mastery of mathematics, in particular calculus. Computers are a marvel of modern engineering. They come in a wide variety and their range of applications seems endless. One of the charac teristics that makes computers different from other engineering products is their programmability. Dishwashers have some limited programming capa is not the key part of the device. Their essential part is some bility, but it enclosed space where the dishes are stored and flushed with hot water. Computers are embedded in many different environments, but in their case the programming capability is the essential part. All computers are programmed in more or less the same way.

On a Method of Multiprogramming

On a Method of Multiprogramming PDF Author: W.H.J. Feijen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475731264
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Here, the authors propose a method for the formal development of parallel programs - or multiprograms as they prefer to call them. They accomplish this with a minimum of formal gear, i.e. with the predicate calculus and the well- established theory of Owicki and Gries. They show that the Owicki/Gries theory can be effectively put to work for the formal development of multiprograms, regardless of whether these algorithms are distributed or not.

Computational Thinking: A Perspective on Computer Science

Computational Thinking: A Perspective on Computer Science PDF Author: Zhiwei Xu
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811638489
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This textbook is intended as a textbook for one-semester, introductory computer science courses aimed at undergraduate students from all disciplines. Self-contained and with no prerequisites, it focuses on elementary knowledge and thinking models. The content has been tested in university classrooms for over six years, and has been used in summer schools to train university and high-school teachers on teaching introductory computer science courses using computational thinking. This book introduces computer science from a computational thinking perspective. In computer science the way of thinking is characterized by three external and eight internal features, including automatic execution, bit-accuracy and abstraction. The book is divided into chapters on logic thinking, algorithmic thinking, systems thinking, and network thinking. It also covers societal impact and responsible computing material – from ICT industry to digital economy, from the wonder of exponentiation to wonder of cyberspace, and from code of conduct to best practices for independent work. The book’s structure encourages active, hands-on learning using the pedagogic tool Bloom's taxonomy to create computational solutions to over 200 problems of varying difficulty. Students solve problems using a combination of thought experiment, programming, and written methods. Only 300 lines of code in total are required to solve most programming problems in this book.

Solving Mathematical Problems

Solving Mathematical Problems PDF Author: Terence Tao
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191568694
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
Authored by a leading name in mathematics, this engaging and clearly presented text leads the reader through the tactics involved in solving mathematical problems at the Mathematical Olympiad level. With numerous exercises and assuming only basic mathematics, this text is ideal for students of 14 years and above in pure mathematics.

Grid and Cloud Computing

Grid and Cloud Computing PDF Author: Katarina Stanoevska
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642051936
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In today’s dynamic business environment, IT departments are under permanent pressure to meet two divergent requirements: to reduce costs and to support business agility with higher flexibility and responsiveness of the IT infrastructure. Grid and Cloud Computing enable a new approach towards IT. They enable increased scalability and more efficient use of IT based on virtualization of heterogeneous and distributed IT resources. This book provides a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of Grids and Clouds and of how companies can benefit from them. A wide array of topics is covered, e.g. business models and legal aspects. The applicability of Grids and Clouds in companies is illustrated with four cases of real business experiments. The experiments illustrate the technical solutions and the organizational and IT governance challenges that arise with the introduction of Grids and Clouds. Practical guidelines on how to successfully introduce Grids and Clouds in companies are provided.

Computability and Complexity

Computability and Complexity PDF Author: Neil D. Jones
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262100649
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Computability and complexity theory should be of central concern to practitioners as well as theorists. Unfortunately, however, the field is known for its impenetrability. Neil Jones's goal as an educator and author is to build a bridge between computability and complexity theory and other areas of computer science, especially programming. In a shift away from the Turing machine- and G�del number-oriented classical approaches, Jones uses concepts familiar from programming languages to make computability and complexity more accessible to computer scientists and more applicable to practical programming problems. According to Jones, the fields of computability and complexity theory, as well as programming languages and semantics, have a great deal to offer each other. Computability and complexity theory have a breadth, depth, and generality not often seen in programming languages. The programming language community, meanwhile, has a firm grasp of algorithm design, presentation, and implementation. In addition, programming languages sometimes provide computational models that are more realistic in certain crucial aspects than traditional models. New results in the book include a proof that constant time factors do matter for its programming-oriented model of computation. (In contrast, Turing machines have a counterintuitive "constant speedup" property: that almost any program can be made to run faster, by any amount. Its proof involves techniques irrelevant to practice.) Further results include simple characterizations in programming terms of the central complexity classes PTIME and LOGSPACE, and a new approach to complete problems for NLOGSPACE, PTIME, NPTIME, and PSPACE, uniformly based on Boolean programs. Foundations of Computing series

Component-Based Development for Enterprise Systems

Component-Based Development for Enterprise Systems PDF Author: Paul Allen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521649995
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
Presents the SELECT Perspective, a component-based approach that addresses the demands of large-scale, complex enterprise software development problems.

A Discipline of Programming

A Discipline of Programming PDF Author: Edsger W. Dijkstra
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Executional abstraction; The role of programming languages; States and their characterization; The characterization of semantics; The semantic characterization of a programming language; Two theorems; On the design of properly terminating; Euclid's algorithm revisited; The formal treatment of some small examples; The linear search theorem; The problem of the next permutation.