Review of Alogrithms and Theory of Computation Handbook: edited by Mikhail Atallah

One uses a handbook by looking up things that you always wanted to know or that come up. Hence, I decided to review this handbook by asking a random collection of theorists (the editors of SIGACT NEWS and theorists in the Maryland-Wash DC area) to email me questions they are either curious about or think ought to be in a handbook. I comment on how well the book does on answering each one, and then summarize how well the book did overall. For each question asked I looked rather carefully in the table of contents and the index; hence, if I say ' the book did not have anything on topic X' and in reality it does, then the books organization is at fault. This book is intended for undergraduates who have had the basic undergraduate theory courses, and for the computer professional. There are 48 chapters. For the table of contents the reader is referred to the website ht tp: / /www.crepress.com. Section 2 comments on the questions that the handbook did well on, and Section 3 comments on those that the handbook did not do so well on. Realize that this is a subjective judgement.