Review of The Computational Beauty of Nature

Its basic premise is that these "most interesting computational topics today" are deeply interrelated, and in some heretofore undescribed ways. The text is well crafted, and the scholarship is both broad and deep. The author is clearly a renaissance man as well as a wonderful teacher. He is equally good at succinct summaries and painting the big picture, and he makes particularly effective use of examples. Best of all is his infectious joy about his subject: The text is full of percolations of delight at the beauty of some concept or equation or at the sheer fun of hacking code.