I spent the last two months flying between Melbourne and Sydney and during this time I had the chance to read Charles Petzold’s The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine.

Charles walks you through pretty much every single paragraph in Turing’s seminal paper. The book begins with a gentle introduction to the mathematical background required to understand Turing’s work. There is also some historical background on Turing and other researchers working on the same topics at that date.

When walking through the paper Petzold not only explains what Turing means by simplifying the mathematical language but illustrates the concepts using different examples. The semi-graphical explanation of how the Turing Machine reads its input is also very helpful.

It is a really nice little book and I recommend it. Knowing more about the theory behind computers is really helpful to understand where we are now and where are we going to.