Computer Science Distilled — Book Review

Recently I read a book a couple of people recommended to me, I found useful to make a review so other people can know what you can find in this book and maybe buy it, or on the other hand, avoid it.

So, without more ado, here is the review.

“Learn the art of solving computational problems” is the subtitle of the book and its quite a good subtitle because it immediately catches the reader’s attention. who doesn’t want to solve problems, particularly in computer science where everything seems to be broken constantly and wild bugs show up every minute.

The book is written by Wladston Ferreira Filho, who owns a master in Computer Science by Federal University of Minas Gerais, he writes in the Preface “This book present computer science concepts in their plain distilled forms” and “For those who studied computer science, this book is an excellent recap for consolidating your knowledge” and I have to say he achieves both of this very well.

As a computer science student and soon an engineer, I think that all the subjects are according to what is taught in the classroom in a C.S program, if you didn’t catch well a subject while you were in college this book may help you to grasp the concepts related to that subject very well, at the same time it will help you to consolidate the knowledge you acquired by filling some knowledge holes you could have .

But don’t worry you won’t have to go through rigid academic concepts and verbose mathematical equations, the author explains as if he was explaining to a non-technical person, he does it very well, in fact sometimes you can feel as if you were chatting with an old friend.

In summary, this book is straightforward to read and presents complex topics of computer science in a very comprehensive way that everyone, even people with no previous knowledge in computer science could understand, with the help of diagrams, charts, pseudocode, figures and analogies with real life. It is a cool manual to have if you are in C.S but it doesn’t deepen in the topics so much.

Cons

• Chapter 7, “Computers” and chapter 8, “Programming” are addressed more superficially than the others and.
• In the programming paradigms section, the OOP and the functional programming paradigm are not addressed.

Pros

• Algorithms explained with figures and pseudocode.
• Very easy to read.
• Has some cartoons with programming jokes
• Plenty of comprehensive examples
• Has a summary of what you will learn and a conclusion at the beginning and the end of each chapter