Books

Short works

Books : reviews

Peter J. Denning, Robert M. Metcalfe, eds.
Beyond Calculation: the next fifty years of computing.
Copernicus. 1997

The contributions are collected in three Parts: • The Coming Revolution • Computers And Human Identity • Business And Innovation

Contents

Gordon Bell, Jim Gray. The Revolution Yet to Happen. 1997
Vinton G. Cerf. When They're Everywhere. 1997
Bob Frankston. Beyond Limits. 1997
Edsger W. Dijkstra. The Tide Not the Waves. 1997
Richard W. Hamming. How to Think About Trends. 1997
Mark Weiser, John Seely Brown. The Coming Age of Calm Technology. 1997
Sherry Turkle. Growing Up in the Culture of Simulation. 1997
Donald A. Norman. Why it's Good that Computers Don't Work Like the Brain. 1997
David Gelernter. The Logic of Dreams. 1997
Franz Alt. End-Running Human Intelligence. 1997
Paul Abrahams. A World Without Work. 1997
Terry Winograd. The Design of Interaction. 1997
Bob Evans. The Stumbling Titan. 1997
Fernando Flores. The Leaders of The Future. 1997
Larry Druffel. Information Warfare. 1997
Abbe Mowshowitz. Virtual Feudalism. 1997
Donald D. Chamberlin. Sharing Our Planet. 1997
William J. Mitchell, Oliver Strimpel. There and Not There. 1997
Dennis Tsichritzis. The Dynamics of Innovation. 1997
Peter J. Denning. How We Will Learn. 1997

Peter J. Denning, Craig H. Martell.
Great Principles of Computing.
MIT Press. 2015

Computing is usually viewed as a technology field that advances at the breakneck speed of Moore’s law. If we turn away even for a moment, we might miss a game-changing technological breakthrough or an earthshaking theoretical development. This book takes a different perspective, presenting computing as a science governed by fundamental principles that span all technologies. Computer science is a science of information processes. We need a new language to describe the science, and in this book Peter Denning and Craig Martell offer the great principles framework as just such a language. This is a book about the whole of computing—its algorithms, architectures, and designs.

Denning and Martell divide the great principles of computing into six categories: communication, computation, coordination, recollection, evaluation, and design. They begin with an introduction to computing, its history, its many interactions with other fields, its domains of practice, and the structure of the great principles framework. They go on to examine the great principles in different areas: information, machines, programming, computation, memory, parallelism, queueing, and design. Finally, they apply the great principles to networking, the Internet in particular.

Great Principles of Computing will be essential reading for professionals in science and engineering fields with a “computational” branch, for practitioners in computing who want overviews of less familiar areas of computer science, and for non-computer science majors who want an accessible entryway to the field.