Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. A: Algorithms and Complexity

Rating:
Summary: A book well worth putting on your shelf.
Review: This book is a collection of articles on complexity theory written by a number of very competent authors. The article by Li/Vitanyi on Kolmogorov complexity and the article by Aho on pattern matching in strings stand out in particular. All articles however are very well written and packed full of useful information, even for readers who are mainly interested in applications. Extensive references are found at the end of each article, lightening the burden of doing further reading on the topics.

Rating:
Summary: Just what you expect from a handbook
Review: This is probably the best or may be the only handbook on theeretical computer science. If one wants to get a good idea on any topic in this field, just open the book and you do not have to run around looking into different books.

On the other hand, this is a huge field, and no handbook can put all of this in one book. I found that many topics that I was looking in were not in good detail at all. For instance I was looking in Fortune's voronoi construction, the terse way of explaining things does not give the reader enough insight.

Rating:
Summary: Just what you expect from a handbook
Review: This is probably the best or may be the only handbook on theeretical computer science. If one wants to get a good idea on any topic in this field, just open the book and you do not have to run around looking into different books.

On the other hand, this is a huge field, and no handbook can put all of this in one book. I found that many topics that I was looking in were not in good detail at all. For instance I was looking in Fortune's voronoi construction, the terse way of explaining things does not give the reader enough insight.