"I'm going to read through Keeton this summer"

When I was in college, I was a double major in a special program that took five years. I majored in electrical engineering and biology. I was hoping to get a job with a company that made instrumentation for medical research or for hospital use. But I was stuck with the mixed problems of needing experience to get a job and needing a job to get experience. No one was willing to take the risk on me. Perhaps I just didn't exude confidence. Maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought I was (only a 3.0 average out of 4.0). Maybe I didn't apply to the right companies. I probably should have gone to graduate school (like my friend in the program did - he is now a medical physicist working with doctors to design MRI and X-ray therapies and imaging). Anyway, that explains a bit about this story - why would an engineer be talking about a biology text?

Every spring, just before we would leave for summer vacation, every other biology major I would talk with about our plans for the summer would include the phrase, "...and I plan to read through Keeton before fall semester." What we were referring to was our general biology text, Biological Science by William T. Keeton (later versions include a second author, James Gould). It was a fantastic text book. It covered every major subject in biology in surprising depth. It covered everything from cell biology to phylogeny. Ecology to animal behavior. Evolution (its theory and its problems) to developmental biology. We used to joke that you could probably use that one book for any course on your way to a degree. But there was so much there that, to my knowledge, no one ever managed to find the time over the summer to actually read through Keeton! There were just too many things to do - like work enough to make money for the coming year of school.

I was reminded of all this recently when Jeff Atwood, at the Coding Horror blog, did a write up of The New Turing Omnibus by A. K. Dewdney. Here is the link to Jeff's article. This is NOT the Keeton of computer science but, in a lot of ways, it is better. It covers a large number of topics that would be covered in a computer science curriculum but the subjects aren't covered in the depth that Keeton covers its subjects. Each chapter is from four to sixteen pages with references and further reading lists. It covers subjects such as algorithms, random numbers, text searching and compression. It talks about Shannon's Theory, regression and Karnaugh Maps. Its long enough to explain what you ought to know but is short enough so you really could get through it over the summer and still get other things done.

I think the obvious difference is that Keeton was meant as a text book and later as a reference book. Dewdney's book is meant more as an introduction; like a preview of the subject. I am going to make an attempt to read through The New Turing Omnibus over the next few months and then see where that leads. Since I never went through a computer science curriculum, I will be learning a lot of new things. I am sure it will open up areas that I will explore more deeply at a later time. I can't wait!