Books by David Harel

This innovative revision of the best-selling first edition presents the most important concepts, methods, and results that are fundamental to the science of computing. Updated to include rich exercise sets, new sections on zero knowledge, interactive proofs, and an extensive bibliography of the most important books and papers in this field.

From a review of the first edition:

‘This book is a veritable tour de force. Harel writes with uncommon verve, clarity and imagination.'

‘Through the use of tantalizing questions and aptly chosen and often amusing examples, the author transmits to the reader the excitement and intellectual satisfaction of computer science research. Without the use of formal mathematics and without any sacrifice of intellectual integrity, he conveys to the general reader the profound principles on which computer science is founded and which hitherto were only accessible in abstruse and esoteric textbooks and papers.'

‘This is scientific writing at its best.'

Dr Stan Scott, Queen's University Belfast. The Times Higher Education Supplement.

This book tells the story of the concepts, ideas, methods and results fundamental to computer science, in a form independent of the details of specific computers, languages and formalisms. It concerns the true 'spirit' of computers; with the 'recipes' that make them tick - their algorithms.

New to this edition

• Chapters on software engineering and on reactive systems.

• Thoroughly revised chapter on programming languages.

• New material on quantum and molecular computing.

• Whole text thoroughly updated to include new material on many topics, including abstract data types, the object-oriented paradigm, primality testing, and system verification and validation.

David Harel is Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is renowned for outstanding research in many areas of the field, and has recently been awarded the Israel Prize in Computer Science.

Yishai Feldman is on the faculty of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya. He specializes in the use of atificial-intelligence techniques in software engineering and its real-world applications.

In COMPUTERS LTD., David Harel, the best-selling author of ALGORITHMICS, illuminates one of the most fundamental yet under-reported facets of computers--their inherent limitations. Looking only at the bad news that is proven, discussing limitations that no amounts of hardware, software, talent, or resources can overcome, the book presents a disturbing and provocative view of computing at the start of the 21st century. Harel takes us on a fascinating tour that touches on everything from tiling problems and monkey puzzles to Monte Carlo algorithms and quantum computing, showing just how far from perfect computers are, while shattering some of the many claims made for these machines. He concludes that though we may strive for bigger and better things in computing, we need to be realistic: computers are not omnipotent--far from it. Their limits are real and here to stay.

Intended for systems engineers, software engineers, and electrical engineers in all fields, this book provides the first detailed description of a set of languages for modeling reactive systems, which underlies the STATEMATE toolset. One key language is Statecharts (invented by author David Harel), perhaps the most popular approach to date for the development of real-time systems. The syntax of the languages is described in a precise and complete manner, and the semantics are developed in a way that clearly and intuitively renders the behavior of modeled systems.