The word “computing” in the title of this book must be interpreted in a broader historical context that includes number systems and hand computation. Electronic computing and computer science (CS) occupy just the second half of the book. The subtitle indicates an approach that does not work. The historical content can be appreciated by readers with a modest mathematical background, but the brief technical topics are terse and hardly sufficiently explained even for more advanced readers. For example, chapter 4 on prime numbers includes a one-paragraph proof of Fermat’s little theorem that refers to multiplicative groups, a concept that is not defined. Chapter 6 on Diophantus talks about a theorem that relates elliptic curves over the field of rational numbers to modular forms. These brief mentions of advanced topics can only be meaningless to the intended audience.

There are four authors and 31 chapters, which are independent of each other so there is no flow or unifying vision to the material. Each chapter has references for further reading, but often these are mainly to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a wonderful creation, but one does not need this book to use it. Chapter 10 covers logarithms and illustrates Napier’s logarithms using a trigonometric formula, which is not what he did. The Wikipedia article referenced is better.

The preface states that “the authors have learned a significant amount while researching our assigned topics, and especially when proofreading each other’s chapters.” As a first draft this might be the start of something useful.