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Title: An Introduction to Symbolic Dynamics and Coding by Douglas Lind, Brian Marcus ISBN: 0-521-55900-6 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 24 November, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $42.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Dense but well-written
Comment: It is late March as I write this. I have been reading the book since mid-January and have made it to page 77. This is in spite of the fact that I put in about 10 hours a week on it. The bulk of the time is spent learning the language for new concepts. I am pleased with the book in that it does an excellent job of foreshadowing those concepts in the wonderful examples and in the exercises.

I would give the advice to do as many of the exercises as possible while continuing to read ahead. If you do this, you will be prepare for what is to come, but you will be less likely to get bogged down.

I began this book because I wanted to understand entropy. It looks as if I will be well-prepared for that when I get to the topic in a few more weeks. It is only about 20 or so more pages away.

Rating: 3
Summary: very dense
Comment: Well, this seems to be the only textbook on the topic of Symbolic Dynamics, but I think it fails as an "introduction". The initial chapter provides very little motivation for the use of Symbolic Dynamics, how it differs or improves on other fields such as Coding Theory and Dynamic Systems, and what kind of problems it would be most suitable for. Frankly, about 20 pages into the book I couldn't even remember why I was reading it.

For better or worse (worse, in my case) the book is written in the style of traditional graduate math books... Definition, Proposition, Definition, Proposition, Definition, Proposition... with very little intervening discussion. Simple, simple concepts are presented in dense, dense notation. Some people appreciate this, I'm sure. Not me.

In summary, I believe this book is written for smarter people than engineering sorts like myself, but as the only text in the area I think a more inclusive approach would have been appropriate.

Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent!
Comment: This is an excellent and self-contained introduction to Symbolic Dynamics. As the title implies, it focuses mainly on coding issues, with some applications to linear algebra.