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.