The Annotated Turing
Charles Petzold
25 people recommended it in 13 threads, 2011–2026.
2 of those were in the last year.
What people on Hacker News said
Again, I loved Petzold's Code so I looked up other books he wrote and this one looks great. I've never actually read Turing's work so I'm excited to have some background and explanation to help me not just read the words but grasp their significance.
Used it because I had a hard time digesting the original Alan Turing paper
On Computable Numbers broken down, annotated, explained, and talked around. Would recommend to anyone interested in CS but without (yet) having formally studied it. I read it in sixth form, and it probably swung me more towards CS from my since-childhood intention of studying electronics.
This is one of the more fascinating books that I've read recently. The commentary makes the paper itself very accessible. I rather enjoyed the direct reproduction of the paper itself (with typos!) in the book, and the near line by line commentary at points.
It doesn't discuss analysis but it gives a nice walkthrough of Turing's classic paper where he introduces the Turing machine and uses it to solve the decidability problem of Diophantine equations.
Charles Petzold (who wrote "Code") has written a very good book which goes through Turing's paper in small sections:
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