Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists 1st Edition by Noson S. Yanofsky (PDF)

Description

The multidisciplinary field of quantum computing strives to exploit some of the uncanny aspects of quantum mechanics to expand our computational horizons. Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists takes readers on a tour of this fascinating area of cutting-edge research. Written in an accessible yet rigorous fashion, this book employs ideas and techniques familiar to every student of computer science. The reader is not expected to have any advanced mathematics or physics background. After presenting the necessary prerequisites, the material is organized to look at different aspects of quantum computing from the specific standpoint of computer science. There are chapters on computer architecture, algorithms, programming languages, theoretical computer science, cryptography, information theory, and hardware. The text has step-by-step examples, more than two hundred exercises with solutions, and programming drills that bring the ideas of quantum computing alive for today’s computer science students and researchers.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This text served as my first formal introduction to the exciting field of quantum computation. I must say, that I couldn’t have asked for a better text to guide me through this wondrous arena of science. The concepts presented within the book were done so in an incredibly clear and concise fashion. The notorious difficulties associated with quantum mechanics were washed away by the very intuitive explanations presented in the book.Whether or not you are a computer scientist, if you have an interest in learning the rudiments of quantum computing this is a fantastic introductory book that presents these ideas in a very friendly way. No previous knowledge of quantum mechanics is necessary either really, as many of the core concepts are explained throughout. Of course, having a basic understanding going in is helpful.Book Scope:The book begins with a look at complex vector spaces and some basics on linear algebra. Most of the mathematics stays within this vicinity with some basic statistics sprinkled throughout later, and only one or two instances of calculus. This makes the text a fantastic introduction to someone who has not yet encountered some of the higher levels of mathematics.They also introduce tensor products early on so that when the section of composite quantum systems arises, the reader is able to go back and intuitively understand how tensor products can be comprehended in this physical sense.What I found especially helpful on the mathematical side of things is that the steps to arrive at certain problems were not omitted, and in fact are provided in great detail. This is especially beneficial to those not familiar or rusty with mathematical concepts presented in the book.From there, the book covers aspects of computer science. For the computer scientists who picked up this book, a lot of this will serve as review. However there are elements presented in the text that do not necessarily come up in the general computer science curriculum. These include actual physical components of computing, and ride more along the pretenses of information theory.After covering the preliminary computational material, the book progresses into developing some quantum mechanical notions. This includes rudimentary experiments such as the double slit experiment, Stern-Gerlach, etc. They are presented in a very friendly manner and also are accompanied by helpful illustrations and written out mathematical explanations.Afterward, the actual concepts of quantum computing are presented. They begin with the notion of a qubit, Bloch sphere, entanglement, etc.From this point on, the book does not really require to be read linearly. Once the core concepts are established, the next few chapters cover topics such as Quantum Circuits, Quantum Algorithms, Information Theory, Theoretical Computer Science, Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Programming etc.So whatever aspect of quantum computing you happen to be especially interested in, you can dive right in and begin learning. Of course you could also continue in a linear fashion and read it all (as I did) for a good overview of the branching of quantum computation.Throughout the text, there are a series of exercises for the reader. Most of these are answered in the back of the book (a huge aid to those self-learning). There are also programming drills sprinkled throughout the text. Since the premise of the book is for interested computer scientists, they allow you to establish and reinforce your comprehension through these programming exercises.What is really beneficial about this is that these exercises are cumulative. So by the end of the book if you continue to work alongside of the text, you will have created a quantum computational emulator.I did this as well during my reading, and it was incredibly beneficial for gaining an intuitive understanding of the subject matter. I’ve always thought that you don’t really understand something, until you can tell it to a computer. Why? Because it involves covering large sets of cases and explaining it in excruciating detail.All in all, I’d highly recommend this book to anyone interested in quantum computing. Whether you are a beginner or novice, this book serves as an outstanding primer to comprehending a beautiful subject.

⭐I very much like the book, but I made the mistake of buying it for my large-sized Kindle. Kindle can’t handle some of the fonts in the equations, so some of them have missing terms. In other cases, characters from the missing fonts were embedded inside the text as raster images. Sometimes a bra appears embedded in the text as a giant image, while the matching ket appears as a normal-sized character.The underlying problem is that the typesetting for the Kindle is often extremely sloppy. In this case, there is no evidence of proof reading. For example, in lists of subscripted variables embedded in the text, some subscripts are correctly typeset and some appear as conventional characters. That doesn’t cause much confusion, but it is a clear sign that the typesetting was never checked. Elements of mathematical expressions that had been dropped in typesetting, either because of typos or incompatible fonts, had not been spotted, and I spent enough time guessing about missing terms that I am now looking for a hardcopy.These problems can’t be explained by the technical limitations of the Kindle. It’s just plain sloppy. Given that I paid $44 for the Kindle version, I think we can expect better. I think the authors of the text can expect better, and I hope they complain about it. I’ve seen similar problems with other Kindle versions of books that have equations. When talking about the Kindle with friends, I cite typesetting of anything but plain text as a significant limitation. Comment PermalinkAddendum 1/22/2012: I now have a hard cover copy and I have studied it thoroughly and enjoyed the book immensely. I have found it to be much more accessible to computer scientists than competing books I have looked at. One of the readers pointed out that it seemed unfair to give my original rating of four stars over a production issue that does not affect the hardcover version. I found out it’s possible to revise a review after it’s been posted, and I am changing my rating to five stars.

⭐I have been studying quantum computing from different sources but this book is the best book I have seen which well written to understand the concept without physics knowledge.I have found after reading this book, the other books or the online resource of quantum computing filed will be easy to understand.Big recommendation: if you are new to the field, start from this book

⭐I was hoping that this book would provide a good introduction to QC at the undergraduate level, but with some rigor. It does a very spotty job. Some topics are adequately covered (the first 5 or 6 chapters are okay, good illustrations). The later chapters are not that great. The treatment of quantum error correction is almost ignored completely. I did like how they mentioned the references in the text and not just with the usual citation. Overall based on this I gave it 3-stars, but….I dropped my review down to 2-stars due to the LARGE number of typographical errors that should have been fixed by this later printing. Some of the material just strikes me as sloppy. For example, pg. 315 where they mention the “NIST Road Map” and refer the reader to the “NIST web site: http://qist.lanl.gov/qcomp_map.shtml”. This is the ARDA roadmap at the Los Alamos National Laboratory web site. You can download the 17 page errata from the publisher (), but my copy of the book says 2013 “reprinted with corrections”, and many of those errors are still in my edition. Very sloppy. I don’t understand why publishers and authors do this? Don’t they have any pride in their work? If this were a car it, it would have been recalled!I suggest the following book instead:Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction (Scientific and Engineering Computation) by E. Rieffel and W. H. Polak.

⭐I finished the first 2 chapters and found this book is interesting to read. Just out of interest, I go to the web page printed in preface. I literally shocked found that there is a 17 pages long errata file, in which contains many fixes of text (many of them involve some equations being wrong completely wrong, not just simple typo in text). I feel lucky I visited that web page, otherwise I would learn something that is wrong from this textbook. Seriously, this book need a review and reprint!

⭐Aceptable. Presenta los 5 algoritmos clasicos Sin pasarse en la teoria. La presentacion y la exposicion son aburridas hasta la saciedad sin embargo. El titulo es engañoso.One of the nicest introduction ever written in quantum computing, it is suitable for physicist too, not only computer scientist. As most of the time, quantum mechanics books are awfully written, meaning more complicated than it is.

⭐I appreaciate this book a lot and even the preliminary math introduction chapters are tailored very much to the topic and fun. I like to see nice graphs and full matrices displayed for every example. Even there is a lot of math, I think the writer did a great job to write a book for people with focus on programming.

⭐This textbook was admirably well written and is very abordable for everyone without any particular mathematical requirements except basic linear algebra.However make sure to download the erratum as there is a lot of mistakes in the original text.I based my quantum computing vourse on this textbook and revised some figures with updated cleaner Tikz figures and I found that my students with very low maths background were able to pick up concepts and theory very easily.

Keywords

Free Download Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists 1st Edition in PDF format
Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists 1st Edition PDF Free Download
Download Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists 1st Edition 2008 PDF Free
Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists 1st Edition 2008 PDF Free Download
Download Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists 1st Edition PDF
Free Download Ebook Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists 1st Edition