MIT

I personally bought this book in preparation for the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and it helped me immensely in getting off the ground with the algorithms I had to learn, especially the chapter on Dynamic Programming. Since then, however it has remained a priceless companion during my studies and at home.

This is the definitive reference for algorithms with a firm theoretical and mathematical foundation. Algorithms are treated with a thorough theoretical introduction often with a complete mathematical walkthrough, a clearly thought out solution, a discussion of its pros and cons, lots of clear and consisive diagrams, a pseudocode implementation, and a good deal of serious optimisation discussion. It's written in an accessible manner, starting with the elementary issues, progressing to the advanced and complex thinking needed to conquer them, so you'll find you have to give it your full concentration.

This book will not disappoint. Its explanations are rigorous and its coverage spans all the general purpose algorithms with little focus on their applications but rather on the algorithms themselves. The book covers such major areas as sorting, data structures, advanced design and analysis techniques, graphs, each about a hundred pages on average, and a selection of specialised algorithms such as parallel programming, string matching and computational geometry. Because these algorithms are used everywhere, from games, graphics and simulations to electrical engineering it will have a broad audience and will find a home almost anywhere there is serious programming involved. Each chapter is a unit in itself which means you don't need to read it cover to cover, since they all start off smoothly and handhold you through. Clearly written by professionals, this is the book I know contains the information that I can't find elsewhere.

I would just like to add a couple points to the review of this book here. First, it is a great introduction to the theoretical foundation of algorithms and computation, and it is not your average algorithm cook book. For that, you can find numerous books on various topics, such as "Algorithms in C" or "Numerical Recipes." Second, the assertion that it is processing power, not code optimization that reigns these days is simply missing the point. It is first of all not true, (just ask any programmers working on games, or serious business processing, or databases, or networks -- you name it -- code optimization is as important as ever; maybe your run of the mill GUI front end needs no optimization, but you wouldn't care about algorithms there anyway). And if you read the book, you will know that a lot of important problems only have exponetial solutions, and exponetial growth in hardware power (aka Moore's law) has a physical limitation. Therefore don't expect improvment in Intel chips to compensate for all of your bad programming. Third, this book pretty much only deals with asymptotic behaviors of algorithms. If you want to learn code optimization, it's by far not enough. You have to optimize the code behavior in each iterative cycle as well, such as reducing the number of comparisons, reducing memory references, reducing floating point multiplications and division etc. However, there seems to be no book on how to reduce such "constants" in algorithms. "Real-world" optimized code often involve techniques that's system dependent, or that uses information/boundary conditions that are not part of the general problem etc. There is no better teacher other than reading some good code or having a discussion with the field warriors - good programmers around you.

In summary, for its purpose - a relatively theoretical treatment of basic algorithms, this book is the best I have seen.

Giving this book a bad review because:
a) you had a bad instructor for the course
b) you find the material difficult
c) you can't understand pseudo-code

are not what I would call constructive or worthwhile critiques of the text of this excellent book. PLEASE society, PLEASE understand that some topics you have to actually WORK at understanding. It won't be spoon fed to you.

It seems moreso with Computer Science majors than other majors (I'm an electrical engineer undergrad, comp sci grad student) that they whine and whine and whine about the math or about it being difficult to actually have to work to understand something.

Oh my GOODNESS!!!! It's hard? Well, BLAME THE BOOK.

Rant over.

This book is amazing. It's the bible of algorithms and, to some extent, data structures. If you're not aforementioned whiners, feel free to buy this book, work hard, and learn a lot! There's not a better book out there in my experience.

People, this book is based on a "true" story, not a fiction. I really enjoyed the book.

Imagine sitting at a blackjack table with ten thousand dollars riding on one hand and thousands more strapped to your chest with velcro. Kevin Lewis, Martinez, Fisher, and others did just that 25 times a year for five consecutive years. Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich tells the story of six MIT students who learn to count cards and win millions in Vegas.
Led by a slightly crazy former MIT professor named Mickey, the MIT team revolutionized the way casinos thought about card counters. Kevin Lewis, at the time, was Mickey's newest recruit. After passing numerous tests given to him by the team, Kevin gets his chance to play in Vegas with the team. His first attempt was a success and he was instantly hooked.
Kevin Lewis was an exceptional student, from his high school prep school days through his admittance to MIT. Kevin was a student who never deviated from focusing on his studies. His recreational activity was being a member of his college swim team. Nothing exciting ever happened to Kevin, so when he was asked to join the card counting team he saw it as a way out of his very mundane life. Up until that moment, Kevin's biggest worry was missing a day helping his professor in the science lab. This particular character attempts to take one giant leap from geeky scholar to high roller. These two traits being so incongruent took him on journey with no set boundaries where he had no control. In the end Kevin realized that taking risks must be tempered with cautiousness.
This is the first book that I have read for school or pleasure that I did not want to put down for one moment. This novel is an intriguing non-fiction novel that reads likes fiction. It is hard to believe that this actually occurred, but the author brings the reader back to reality in the end when there is no final closure as the characters continue to live there lives. I would suggest this book for anybody of any age who enjoys the fine line between fiction and reality.

As a physician I have my fill of non-fiction with an abundance of journals so when I read for relaxation I want a story that keeps me excited, interested and sleepless until it is finished. Bringing Down the House is such a book and reads like a Clancy or Pollock with a little lower body count, but with no less excitement.

Ben Mezrich is superb writer and story teller with the amazing ability to weave the excitement of a Las Vegas casino, the mathmetics of card counting with enjoyable interpersonal dynamics so that this is a consuming story with people you care about. His description of the high roller lifestyle in Vegas takes you to the tables playing sums you watch others wager with the adrenaline rush like you were part of the team. I bought the book in Boston having just missed him at a book signing and had a hardtime finishing the conference. I found myself in the room reading a book I could not put down instead of going out in one of the towns in which the story was set. It was that engrossing.

My Christmas list now contains all of his previous writings as this is an author who knows how to tell a story.

This book is a good example of the 19th Century European adultery novel; as such, it rates somewhere above Madame Bovary and below Anna Karenina. Still, Fontane is very under read in the English speaking world. Read this, and pay attention to the details. Fontane is wonderfully subtle and doesn't waste a word. This seems to be the most popular translation, as well.

Theodor Fontane's 1895 novel, "Effi Briest," is the moving and melancholy story of Effi, a sprightly teenage girl whose limited interactions with society and the moral bearings of that society are brought into direct and terrible conflict. Fontane gives an all too realistic portrayal of late 19th century Victorian morality and the lives of minor German aristocrats. The novel relates Effi's struggle to negotiate the constraints of society as an extremely young woman who in many ways rejects them all.

"Effi Briest" begins as Effi, a fifteen year old girl, enjoys the privileges of wealth and beauty in the small town of Hohen-Cremmen. She plays with the other young girls of her neighbourhood, Herta, Berta, and Hulda. They play childish games and indulge each other in romantic stories and juvenile ambitions. One day, while telling the story of an unrealized love affair between her own mother and a military officer, Geert von Innstetten, Effi is informed that Innstetten, now upwards of forty years old, has come to visit, and has proposed marriage to Effi. Effi cannot but comply. Relocated to the port town of Kessin, Effi finds herself in a commercial center, without the kind of genteel society she is accustomed to, nor the variety or the spontaneity in her lifestyle that she had always enjoyed. Innstetten's workaholism and emotionally detached bearing make life nearly insufferable for her. She is relieved by two men, Gieshubler, a kindly old hunchbacked chemist; and Major Crampas, a 'reformed' libertine whose marriage is unsatisfying. Gieshubler offers Effi a haven of conversation and empathy; Crampas offers her a seductive, liberatory companion. As Innstetten's job absorbs most of his time, he permits and even encourages Effi to spend time with Crampas. A secret correspondence between Effi and Crampas sets the scene for the rest of the novel.

"Effi Briest" is really an extraordinary work. Fontane examines throughout the novel the effect of national and international politics, cultural mobility, and trade on the individual. Fontane's presentation of the port town of Kessin, in particular, is fascinating. Here, Effi is truly taken out of the sheltered life of Hohen-Cremmen and exposed to a mobile and commercial society, where people from different cultures and epistemologies flit in and out of her life, like the seemingly liberated woman, Maria Trippelli, in whom Effi takes an intense interest, and Roswitha, a lapsed Catholic nursemaid. In Kessin, she is also encounters a story that haunts the entire novel, the highly evocative and ambiguous story of the Chinaman.

Ambiguity is a hallmark of "Effi Briest" and is a major part of the appeal of Fontane's novel. Fontane refrains from making authorial pronouncements or assessments on his characters' actions and situations. To what extent, for example, does Innstetten's political ambition justify the lack of time he devotes to his young wife? Is Effi an agent in her own life, or is she a reactive victim to social morality and impossible standards, especially as a teenage wife? The relationship between Effi's parents highlights this ambiguity, bringing it even into ambivalence, as every difficult situation draws from Effi's father a dismissal of "that's too big a subject". Overall, a very complex and beautiful novel.

"Effi Briest" is not just a German version of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina - it is quite unique in its depiction of a not untypical 19th century marriage. At the age of 17 the impetuous Effi Briest is married to a man 21 years her senior. He is decent enough in his treatment of her, but for Effi being married is a horrible experience, mostly because her husband's job forced her to move to the small town of Kessin where hardly anybody is fit to become her friend.

What always strikes me about Fontane is the fairness and the understandig he shows towards his characters. "Effi Briest" is Fontane's psychological insight at his best. None of characters is gloryfied, none vilified. You can identify with Effi and understand what drives her into the arms of another man; but you can also see that her husband simply doesn't understand what he is doing to Effi; actually he's doing his best to make her happy.

When the attractive, ageing womanizer Major Crampas moves into town, Effi pities him at first. Later, her attitude changes, but Fontane does not give any details of what's going on between the two. He shows what made it happen - and how Effi and her husband will deal with it. - It is a very entertaining read, not least because of Fontane's excellent low-key sense of humour.

This is a quick and fascinating read, filled with great anecdotes from the author's 30 years as a project manager for Univac and Control Data. In technical matters the book is very accessible (true bit twiddlers will be hungry for more detail), but it's real strength is its character sketches. After I finished, Seymour Cray and the other key figures discussed in the book seemed a little more real. The author's admiration for "white socks" engineers is understandable, but he pushes the point too far. By the end, the refrain of "self-serving managers spoil while the noble engineers toil" seemed a little naive.

Lots of first person inside information about the early days of commercial mainframe computers. The story covers Univac, Control Data Corporation (CDC) and Cray. The author tells how disenchanted Univac employees founded CDC and then later how Cray was founded when CDC managed to offend their lead designer Seymore Cray, whom they had lured away from Univac. The strange and incestuous relationships of the three companies is covered from an insider's point of view. The author reveals what a hotbed of computer development the Twin Cities (St. Paul and Minneapolis Minnesota) was in the '60s and '70s. It also has some absolutely fascinating information about Seymore Cray. Any serious student of computer history should have this book.

I've read a lot of the "history of computers" books, and this one is a standout. It's great fun to read and avoids that POV that the first computer ever was the Apple I.

This book was an excellent read. Garfinkel was able to write about some of the most interesting developments in network technology. This book is great for people who dont have a complete understanding of what the internet is all about and where it came from. Garfinkel draws a lot of attention and gives a lot of much needed credit to academic research labs for their impact on computer technology. The book's three main parts take the reader on a journey from the development of project MAC (short for multiple access computer and machine aided cognition) in the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) in MIT to the growth of large computer networks to the impact these networks and systems will have on our society and economy in the future. The book gave me a great history lesson on some of the lesser known aspects of computer network development. I'd recommend this book to anyone who doesnt understand how many years and how long the road has been to developing the computer systems of today.

It is a pleasure for me to write a review on "Architects of the Information Society ", because I have so much things to say. I have been telling to my friends about this book since I finished first ten pages. I am not talking only with computer scientists about the things I have learned. My mother even loved the stories in it, although she had never used a computer or never logged in Internet. Simson L. Garfinkel has been very successful in choosing the right words, which will make the story interesting for everyone. It is written for everyone who knows what computers and Internet are. It starts fascinating the reader by telling stories about people who think that Internet was invented by some companies connecting the local area networks (LANs) in their office and about two business men praising Microsoft founder Bill Gates for having the vision to invent Windows being unaware of nearly all of the "breakthrough" technologies in Windows had actually been invented more than thirty years before, at MIT just a few miles away from the coffee shop they were in. I think everyone who uses Internet must read this book to have an idea what and who was behind it and to love to use Internet more. It has been written for the celebration of 35th anniversary of the foundation of Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT. Project MAC (short for Multiple Access Computer and Machine-Aided Cognition) was started in 1963. It was renamed as MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in 1975. Being MIT alumni Garfinkel was lucky in following the tracks of best stories to tell what has been done in LCS. It was Prof. Hal Abelson's idea to make Garfinkel write such a book; he is also the editor of the book. In the preface Garfinkel says that "This book as much his as mine." meaning Abelson. There are three essays in the book. While deciding the themes of the essays, they planned to mention the themes that have been fundamental to the work at LCS. First essay is about the building of "multiple-access computer" by "time-sharing". Second essay is about the growth of computer networks. Third essay is about how networks computer systems have influenced and will continue to influence U.S. economy and society. Garfinkel defines this economy as the economy based on the "exchange of information". The best sentence to show the importance of this book is written by Garfinkel "The step from information systems to information societies was first achieved at MIT in project MAC".

Now this is really a strange book. As I'm German this was on the "to read" list in school. But to be true I enjoyed this story of a boy who finds himself transformed to an Insect. You certainly think that this book was written by a lunatic. But that is also where the fascination lies. I'd say read and see for yourselves!

Kafka is brilliant, as most anyone who reads this book will soon realize. He dealves into different ranges such as the Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). Possibly a little far out there due to his style for some, but I doubt it. The English translation is required reading in my IB school, but the german version (recommended by my Austrian teacher) was even better. One can delve deeper into the metaphor through the feelings behind every word and phrase. Kafka, like many Jews and people of that era, was the victim of severe isolation. Die Verwandlung portrays this feeling perfectly. This is bar none one of the best pieces of literature I have ever picked up.

Board your Goldstream Fighter spacecraft, launch and deploy for combat! Join the Earth Task Force with your benevolent alien allies, the Mit-Ro-Don, and courageously defend the Earth from all but certain destruction at the hands of the evil Chit-Chit-Kunak!

Spires' first science fiction novel is a big hit, a thoroughly engrossing read, at a very quick pace. Action on almost every page! A thrilling, highly creative tale of desperate space battles of gargantuan proportions. And the good, hard science will appeal to many readers.

Spires personal aviation and military experience shows frequently, as we follow the day-to-day military adventures of Earth volunteer Jim DeLucca, in a manner reminiscent of Heinlein's Starship Troopers (but without the fascism!).

The action is so fast and furious that one does wish at times that Spires had slowed down a bit to flesh out the characters, but this is but a minor criticism. All in all, an outstanding debut, and we eagerly await more, much more from Dan Spires!

this is one of my favorite novels of all time. it has everything! flying saucers, alien wars, shocking plot twists, and even Bob Hope! it's the story of a guy who joins forces with an alien culture living on Earth who convince the world to join up with them to stop an evil alien armada hell-bent on destroying the world. if you like 'war of the worlds', you'll enjoy this even more. it has mr. explosion!'s personal seal of approval, and what more could you ask for than that?

Annotation: "Wuthering Heights" is about Heathcliff, an orphan, who is raised by Mr. Earnshaw as one of his own children. Hindley despises him, but wild Cathy becomes his constant companion, and he falls violently in love with her. When she will not marry him, Heathcliff's terrible vengeance ruins them all - but still his and Cathy's love will not die.

Author Bio: Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her mother died in 1821. Between the years 1824 and 1825 Emily attended the school at Cowan Bridge with Charlotte, and then was educated at home. Her first novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a story-within-a-story, did not gain immediate success, but it has acclaimed later fame as one of the most intense novels written in the English language. Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis in the late 1848. She had caught cold at her brother Branwell's funeral in September. After the appearance of Wuthering Heights, some skeptics thought that the book was written by Branwell, on the grounds that no woman from such circumscribed life, could have written such passionate story. After her sisters' deaths, Charlotte edited a second edition of their novels, with prefatory commentary aimed at correcting what she saw as the reviewers' misunderstanding of Wuthering Heights. The complex time scheme of the novel had been taken as evidence by the critics, that Emily had not achieved full formal control over her narrative materials.

Evaluation: Hate is proven to be weaker than love when it comes to Heathcliff. Heathcliff and Catherine are meant to be together. Since the time when they were children they loved one another. Many people tried to keep them apart and they succeeded at times, but their love for one another always shined through. Heathcliff went through a period where he felt that getting even would mend what everyone put him through, but the last part of his revenge remained undone and there was finally some sort of happiness. Love finally outweighed hate creating the happiness between Cathy and Hareton, and Heathcliff and Catherine. It is truly better to love than it is to hate.
Overall, "Wuthering Heights", is extremely enjoyable. I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys gothic elements incorporated with romance and drama. There are so many themes explored. One thing happens after another, making you want to keep reading and find out what happens next. I liked the fact that love overpowered hate at the end. Jealousy, love, hatred, and tragedy are all mixed together in "Wuthering Heights", leaving you with a novel that's hard to put down.

When it was first published under a pseudonym in 1847, Wuthering Heights caused a scandal. The staid and drab era of the 1840's was simply not used to such an intense and disturbing story of such raw passion and cruelty. In this tale of love and tragedy, an orphan named Heathcliff is adopted and comes to live at Wuthering Heights. He falls in love with the man's daughter, Catherine. But his life is hell because of her brother. Catherine's brother hates and humiliates him. Heathcliff can take it no more and eventually he runs away. He's gone a long time and in the meantime, Catherine marries, even though it's Heathcliff she's really in love with. Heathcliff returns dandified and rich... to take his revenge. But I won't give away the climax and ending. Heart-stopping and intense! Not for everyone, certainly not for the light 'n' fluffy inspirational romance reader, but for fans of Charlotte Bronte and Thomas Hardy.

David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness"

I have always considered Wuthering Heights the best offering from the Bronte brood. It may be a soap opera, but WHAT a soap opera--and besides, the writing, dark and Victorian though it is, is superb and more than a little mad.

The two most over-used adjectives used to describe this book are "dark and brooding." So I won't use them, but it will be hard. Because out of the ashes, almost literally, of a dark, dreary, oppressive estate on the English moors flames the love affair of all time: the daughter of the house, Catherine, and the wild foundling brought into the family as a child--Heathcliff. Catherine and Heathcliff have a special bond, even as children, but when adulthood arrives, their bond flares into unbearable passion.

Tortured Heathcliff wandering the moors calling for Cathy; married Cathy dying in her bed for love of Heathcliff; ahhhh. Nothing better. One wonders, of course, what forbidden thoughts churned beneath the genteel breast of Emily Bronte as she wrote of this unmistakeably sexual and erotic relationship. I have also wondered more than once if Heathcliff was modeled on the Bronte Sisters' wild and untameable brother Bramwell. But I am no literary historian. I am only a lover of books, and this particular one resides on my all-time top ten. If you have never read it, or if you consider it one of those dreary required assignments you fled in high school, give it another chance. There is nothing else like it.

This book was easy to read - and for me that is its secret. Lahiri's clear prose demystifies what for most Americans is still a largely 'strange' culture. Yet the rituals, and foods, described are enough of a departure from the norm to be of compelling interest to many readers. Also - the lack of previous narratives about a very specific Indian immigrant experience -- that of well educated, Brahmin, well-off but not wealthy (ie - securely middle class) immigrants, mostly in the tech industry or the professions -- has made this book popular among first generation Indians who feel the story "resonates" with their own. Recently a friend who describes himself as "unliterary" said he enjoyed the book because he'd never read a book before that captured his own experience so closely.
The thing that's rather sad is that books in this genre which have taken on darker, more interesting and potent themes have simply not sold as well as Lahiri's work. While writing style must in part account for this, I think it's also the sanitized version of "immigrant conflict" she consistently delivers that makes her work stand out. Her dissociation from other Indian writers is somewhat sad as well: she is forced to do this to maintain a sense of "literary quality" key to her insider status -- yet clearly her writing is not de novo, and a large part of her audience is made up of Indian and other South Asian readers whose taste for this genre has benefited her sales.

It's not bad; it's not good. It's a huge step up from a lot of mass market paperbacks -- but it's nowhere near the quality of Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, Susan Choi, Sandra Cisneros, Monique Truong, Rikki Ducarnet, Jessica Hagedorn. Yet all these writers have been much more 'ghettoized', in terms of being identified as "ethnic writers" in a way Lahiri hasn't -- because they write about things that might make the average American reader react to with shame, anger, sadness, guilt. I found myself asking: What is the point? What is the point of endlessly detailing the minutiae of a certain kind of difference only in terms of its interiority, and never with an eye to external conflict, savagery, politics or morals? Some of her short stories do take on the larger world in a way that liked a bit better - but only glancingly, and with a kind of acceptance of the random cruelty of strangers that I found deeply cynical, and without the vibrant kind of questioning and perusal that you find in a writer like Anita Desai, for example, who also writes very plainly and crisply, but whose characters have a depth that Lahiri's lacks. But Desai is less likely to sell the way Lahiri has, because her books are not quite as easy to read; because they make you feel, think, and directly confront an 'alien' culture on its own terms.

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake did not disappoint. True, I believed her Interpreter of Maladies was an extraordinary work, and I was eager to see if she could sustain such brilliance throughout a singular story. The quick answer is that she does not. But that doesn't make this a bad book -- just not an especially memorable one. Because the synopsis of the story is mentioned in most of the other reviews, I won't dwell on it here. There are numerous Induan writers out there today and this book probably suffered a bit in comparison to all (...) But I can't sell Lahiri short. She's a marvelous writer and I believe most people will enjoy her book

With her 1999 collection of short stories, INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, Pulitzer-Prize winning writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, proved her talent for storytelling and keen eye for detail. She demonstrates those same abilities again in her poignant first novel, THE NAMESAKE. Lahiri's book follows the thirty-two year journey of its protagonost, Gogol Ganguli, from his birth to Bengali-American parents in 1968, to a transitional moment in his life in 2000, and ultimately to his self-acceptance. Along the way, and always at odds with Indian-American culture, Lahiri's character changes the given name he hates from Gogol to Nikhil, suffers the death of his academic father, studies architecture at Yale and Columbia, marries Moushumi, an American-Bengali woman, and then encounters divorce. The point of Lahiri's compelling novel is not so much about the significance of one's name--"There's no such thing as a perfect name," Gogol recognizes at one point in his life (p. 145)--as it is about attempting to accept, interpret, and comprehend the events in our lives that shape us into who we are (p. 187). Although short in length, Lahiri serves up much food for thought in THE NAMESAKE.

G. Merritt

Winston's book is really terrible. I mean truly repellently, malignantly bad. "Can it really be as bad as all that?" you wonder. Yes!! It's that bad!! For starters, the book is poorly organized. Topics that logically belong together are often several chapters apart. There is no overall structure to the book. It seems like a collection of topics in AI that were hastily assembled without concern for thematic organization or flow. For example, the forward and backward chaining algorithms are presented in a chapter (Ch. 7) on rule-based systems, but are not even mentioned in the chapter (Ch. 13) on logic! Perceptron training is presented AFTER backpropagation! Contrast this with the much better book by Russell and Norvig, which uses the theme of intelligent agents as a continuing motivation throughout, and which groups related topics into logically arranged chapters.

The examples in Winston are atrocious. The main example in the backpropagation chapter is some kind of classification network with a bizarre topography. This example is so trivial and weird that it totally fails to illustrate the strengths of backpropagation. The explanations of generalization and overfitting in backprop training are awful.

The only chapter of this book that is not an unmitigated pedagogical disaster is the chapter on genetic algorithms, although better introductions exist (e.g. Melanie Mitchell).

A further annoyance is the placement of all the exercises at the end of the book instead of the end of the chapters to which they correspond.

Avoid this book. It is truly horrible, and vastly superior books on AI are readily available at comparable prices.

Suppose you are, like me, a software engineer who never actually studied CS beyond junior level undergraduate 'data structures'... and now you have to work on something involving complicated pattern matching... this is how to do it: buy this book and Sipser's on the Theory of Computation. After digesting them (which is easy if you're as good with logical mathematics as the typical software engineer), you should be able to read current literature in either field, and will have a deep, fundamental understanding of how to best solve whatever problem you're working on. That's what worked for me, anyway. An excellent book, as is Sipser's.

Having purchased this book as a supplement to Winston's course at MIT, I can very highly recommend it as a very comprehensive, up-to-date, well written text summarizing the field. The book covers essentially all of the topics pertenant in modern AI with enough detail for a complete implementation without being overly technical. I strongly recommend it to anybody looking to build intelligent systems or to anybody simply perusing the field for abstract ideas.