The New Turing Omnibus is the followup book to the The Turing Omnibus.Both are written by A.K. Dewdney, a computer science professor at the University of Western Ontario (at least he was at the time of publication in 1996).
The book itself is essentially a layman's guide (although you have to be reasonably intelligent and actually interested in the subject. The book isn't for everyone) to computer science. I myself picked it up around sometime in junior high (at which time most of it made no sense) and over time, as my education has increased, more of it has been useful to understanding concepts I have encountered in my computer science curriculum as well as knowledge that just seems interesting.
The book itself is made up of 66 chapters or "excursions" as the author refers to them:
1
Algorithms
2
Finite Automata
3
Systems of Logic
4
Simulation
5
Godel's Theorem
6
Game Trees
7
The Chomsky Hierarchy
8
Random Numbers
9
Mathematical Research
10
Program Correctness
11
Search Trees
12
Error-Corecting Codes
13
Boolean Logic
14
Regular Languages
15
Time and Space Complexity
16
Genetic Algorithms
17
The Random Access Machine
18
Spline Curves
19
Computer Vision
20
Karnaugh Maps
21
The Newton-Raphson Method
22
Minimum Spanning Trees
23
Generative Grammars
24
Recursion
25
Fast Multiplication
26
Nondeterminism
27
Perceptrons
28
Encoders and Multiplexers
29
CAT Scanning
30
The Partition Problem
31
Turing Machines
32
The Fast Fourier Transform
33
Analog Computing
34
Satisfiability
35
Sequential Sorting
36
Neural Networks That Learn
37
Public Key Cryptography
38
Sequential Cirucits
39
Noncomputerable Functions
40
Heaps and Merges
41
NP-Completeness
42
Number Systems for Computing
43
Storage by Hashing
44
Cellular Automata
45
Cook's Theorem
46
Self-Replicating Computers
47
Storing Images
48
The SCRAM
49
Shannon's Theory
50
Detecting Primes
51
Universal Turing Machines
52
Text Compression
53
Disk Operating Systems
54
NP-Complete Problems
55
Iteration and Recursion
56
VLSI Computers
57
Linear Programming
58
Predicate Calculus
59
The Halting Problem
60
Computer Viruses
61
Searching Strings
62
Parallel Computing
63
The Word Problem
64
Logic Programming
65
Relational Data Bases
66
Church's Thesis
Any of you computer science folks out there should recognize many of these topics. I would highly recommend the book as a basic reference or if some of the concepts didn't quite "click" for you in your coursework. Some of the first coding I did, on a Tandy 1000 Color in BASIC, was from the first chapter on Algorithms which involves a cool little "wallpaper" graphics program.
Each chapter includes problems and reference for further information. Essentially, it could very easily be used as a textbook for some sort of survey course.
Fixed some links (
November 13, 2002)