Tom Stuart - Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines to Impossible Programs

Im grateful for the hospitality of Go Free Range, who provided me with office space, friendly conversation, and tea throughout the writing of this book. Without their generous support, Id definitely have gone a bit Jack Torrance.

Thank you to James Adam, Paul Battley, James Coglan, Peter Fletcher, Chris Lowis, and Murray Steele for their feedback on early drafts, and to Gabriel Kerneis and Alex Stangl for their technical reviews. This book has been immeasurably improved by their thoughtful contributions. Id also like to thank Alan Mycroft from the University of Cambridge for all the knowledge and encouragement he supplied.

Many people from OReilly helped shepherd this project to completion, but Im especially grateful to Mike Loukides and Simon St.Laurent for their early enthusiasm and faith in the idea, to Nathan Jepson for his advice on how to turn the idea into an actual book, and to Sanders Kleinfeld for humoring my relentless quest for perfect syntax highlighting.

Thank you to my parents for giving an annoying child the means, motive, and opportunity to spend all his time mucking about with computers; and to Leila, for patiently reminding me, every time I forgot how the job should be done, to keep putting one damn word after another. I got there in the end.

The code in this book is written in Ruby, a programming language that was designed to be simple, friendly, and fun. Ive chosen it because of its clarity and flexibility, but nothing in the book relies on special features of Ruby, so you should be able to translate the code examples into whatever language you preferespecially another dynamic language like Python or JavaScriptif that helps to make the ideas clearer.