The authors’ aims include a start from “first principles,” such as a grounding in general logic, perhaps linking to “machine intelligence” philosophy and “empirical significance” epistemology, and “full breadth,” that is, a broader selection of application areas and notes on parallelism.

The aims are good, but the delivery is not. The book suffers from too much early emphasis on propositional logic; poor treatment of expressibility in clause or other first-order forms; confusion about Prolog’s relation to first-order logic; incorrect comments about “iff”; “possible” where “sufficient” is meant; neglect of the most general unifier; backtracking and cut introduced by contrived examples; an awkward formulation blamed on Prolog, as if it were an elixir; and much more.

The book provides some added coverage, namely the philosophical tones; perhaps increased numerical processing; a Mendelian genetics example of the authors’ own making; and a larger-than-usual collection of moderate-size examples (averaging perhaps 150 lines of code). The latter are essentially copied from other works, errors and all, including some unneeded statements. Also, a few features are used that will not work in everybody’s Prolog. The general philosophical view, including remarks on the “explicitness” of Prolog databases, means that the reaches of the elixir extend to larger bodies of code in Prolog, with their needing little or no documentation. A lesson to the contrary exists in Goble [1], where the putatively simpler calculations in business data processing are seen to benefit from a solid software development methodology. The authors’ claim to do more on the “modeling process” seems unrealized.

Typos and errors abound; I quit counting them after about 20. Many are in program listings. It took considerable effort, including consulting reference materials, for me to make a couple of the larger programs run. Page numbers and index items match poorly, and some entries do not appear at all; it is evident that additional pages were added to an earlier manuscript, with inadequate index adjustments. Offering a small size, big promises, and a reasonably low cost, the book may well secure more sales than it deserves (my local public library purchased it). A work purporting to spread the Prolog gospel to the larger world, it could well harm the very cause it alleges to promote.