preface

It can be tremendously difficult for an outsider to understand why computer scientists are interested in computer science. It is easy to see the sense of wonder of the astrophysicist or the evolutionary biologist or zoologist. We don’t know too much about the mathematician, but we are in awe anyway. But computer science? Well, we suppose it must have to do with computers at least. “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes,” wrote the great Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra (1930–2002). That is to say, the computer is our tool for exploring this subject and for building things in its world, but it is not the world itself.

This book makes no attempt at completeness whatsoever. It is a set of little sketches of the use of computer science to address the problems of book production. By looking from different angles at interesting challenges and pretty solutions, we hope to gain some insight into the essence of the thing.

I hope that, by the end, you will have some understanding of why these topics interest computer scientists, and perhaps you will find that some of them interest you.