This book is a tutorial text that introduces PROLOG concepts and the MICRO-PROLOG programming language. The text is divided into two major sections: the first introduces PROLOG and the second shows how the language can be used to program a variety of applications. The text is tied to MICRO-PROLOG; it would not suffice for someone with another dialect of PROLOG.

The first hurdle for a student of PROLOG is to understand the PROLOG execution model. Saram illustrates the model via a series of cartoons. While I applaud the novel attempt, I did not find the cartoons very enlightening. They are longwinded--the illustration of a single unification takes 11-2- pages--and they do not provide a technique that the student can use to understand complex clauses. Even in the text, when the going gets tough (as on p. 80) Saram resorts to a more compact diagram to illustrate the execution path. Unfortunately, this compact diagram is one of a kind and is not explained in the text.

The second hurdle for the PROLOG student is to understand the idioms of the language. The most important idioms revolve around list processing. The lack of a compact pictorial model hurts here. Even showing a clause-by-clause trace of routines like append would help. Instead the presentation largely takes the form “this query yields this answer.”

A text that is devoted to a particular implementation of a language has the opportunity to be very tutorial in nature. That is, the text can show the student exactly how things will look on the display screen. Unfortunately, Saram does not take advantage of this opportunity. The program displays are in the same font as the prose, so it is difficult at times to distinguish literal text from its explanation. (Yet in the Appendix the example programs are printed in a fine typewriter font. Why wasn’t this font used in the rest of the text?) More damaging, few of the examples show MICRO-PROLOG’s response, although Saram provides plenty of examples of clauses to type. Without the software, this makes the book difficult to follow; even with the software, the incomplete dialogue misses out on the opportunity to confirm that the student is following the text correctly.

Overall, I found the text to be well written and the presentation to be even. Saram has targeted the book for nonprogrammers: high school teachers, high school students, and undergraduates in the social sciences. I feel that the author has gone a long way to present PROLOG in a manner accessible to nonprogrammers. Unfortunately, the book’s major shortcomings--the lack of a usable execution model and the incomplete display of interaction--detract markedly from its success.