Logic in Computer Science: Modelling and Reasoning about Systems 2nd Edition

This text offers a great introduction to computational logic. Even if this is not your course's text, I highly recommend considering this book to augment your material. It is extremely approachable.

The coverage of this book is quite good for what concerns logic in computer science. However, using it as an introduction on logic for computer scientists is probably ambitious because the explanations are rather complicated for undergraduates. A first course on logic and another on AI would not hurt before getting into this one. Too many notions of computer science (syntax and semantics of programming languages, complexity) are needed to fully understand some topics, hence it is better that you already have a broad view of all aspects of computer science before reading this one. As an advanced course textbook to formal techniques in computer sciente on the other hand, this one would do the job.

I would say prior introduction to logic would definitely help.This is a good book. The subject matter isn't easy, but I feel the explanations are clear and not overtly verbose. This may not be what you want to hear, but read it slowly, thoroughly, and repeatedly and you will definitely get your moneys worth. This is the second book on logic I've read, but conceptually has definitely had a bigger impact on my reasoning and day to day thinking. I've been surprised at the places this way of thinking has come out.

I read this book to learn the basics of model checking, and I found it an excellent introduction. Logic can be a dry and intimidating subject but this text presents the theory in an engaging style. Concepts are always introduced with concrete examples to explain them and to show how they should be used to reason about software. This book is essentially theoretical, there is no presentation of real world uses of the methods.

If I didn't have to buy this book for one of my subjects, I would never buy it. It is quite hard to follow at times. If I didn't have exposure to logic from before, I'd probably struggle with this book. But if you re-read things over, you do get it in the end. I wish the book explained things in more detail and in simpler ways. It seems the authors did not keep in mind that the readers are not as experienced in logic as they are. I also didn't like the fact that there's quite a bit of errata in the book, which can be quite confusing to a student.

In my opinion (I refer to the II edition)the logic treatment is fairly complete for a computer science student (anyway it's missing the treatment of Prolog and the relevant logic).This book is also an excellent introduction to Model Checking of Clarke.

A lot of good material is covered and in a relatively tight fashion. The presentation of logic is well done, but when getting into the BDDs, the explanations get a little complicated and I personally had to read it over several times before I could make sure I understood what was going on. This book also does not have anything on symmetry, so if that's what you're looking for, there are better books out there. However, this book can hold its own and I recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics of model checking provided they can take handle some of the heavy duty reading.

There's a black mark on the side of my book, and that's the only minor flaw.