Blog 5

Having read Pattern on the Stone before last year, I skimmed through most the chapters and did not do an in depth reading of it, I would liked to because of how much I enjoyed it, but work and projects from other classes kept me from having the time to do so. While I did skim through it, I did enjoy being refreshed on some parts of the history of computers and how they work, the logic behind them, the potential future of computing, and did find bits of information that I had missed. My two favorite parts of the books include the Turing machine section and the section on quantum computing. Those are both interesting topics to me and I enjoy learning about both of them. Pattern on the Stone does a brilliant job touching on both of those subjects and makes them easy and interesting to learn about. I did spend a little time going through some wikipedia articles about Turing and I am very excited for the new Turing movie with Benedict Cumberbatch that will be coming out this year. I also spent some free time reading into the recent advances of quantum computing which was a nice way to burn through some free time i had between classes. While I do not know everything about computers and their history or future, I still felt like I knew most of what the book talked about. What I enjoyed most about the book was how simple it is to read, it skips most of the technical jargon and puts it into simple layman terms which is nice every now and then. If I had to recommend this to someone, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone that does not understand computers very well and to those that wish to learn more about them. Something I did not like about the book was how fast it glazed over the concepts of logic in computing and the math behind it. The author could have spent a bit more time explaining it more in depth, I feel this because this is a very important element in how computers work and think. All in all this is a very good book and I would definitely recommend it to everyone. I very much enjoyed reading it for a class again and I will probably end up reading it again in the future for pleasure.