Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Third Edition

The 4th edition has remarkable changes compared to the 3rd edition, which was written in 1990. Almost all the references are highly up-to-date, new trends in the AI field and new applications leveraging expert systems are introduced all through this book. The content ranges from an overview to the technology of Expert Systems, the basic scientific foundation of Expert Systems and the CLIPS tool for implementing expert systems. There are two chapters about reasoning under uncertainty and inexact reasoning, which are the ways the AI systems are heading. Things like semantic web, its advantage and problems are very well sorted out in the first chapter. The authors put a good deal of humour into the text all through this book, the formal logic stuff is not that boring as it usually appears in other book. I wish I had had this book as my first book for formal logic/deduction systems. The mathematical mechanisms for things like resolution/deduction are explained with plenty of well-arranged diagrams and tables to help readers understand better. Every chapter comes with well-designed assignments. An excellent text book for introductory AI courses (I believe a motivated high-school kid will have no problem to understand the book since it is so well written). And also a good reference for those who need to look up basic concepts while engineering expert systems. I'm constructing an expert system at the moment, got this book 2 weeks ago and it's already dog-eared on my desk. For its targeted audience, this book is truly the best-of-breed. Highly recommended.

An excellent text for a first course in Expert systems.

This book gives a reasonable, detailed and seriuous account on expert system. A detailed presentation of the CLIPS expert-system language, along with the interpreter, is provided. Excellent for starting work on expert systems as part of integrated software packages.

The authors give a good cursory background on knowledge representation within AI. Chapters 7 - 12, present CLIPS syntax and usage. The information in these chapters helped me to develop a simulation involving four intelligent agents, colloborating via a blackboard. The book provides no details with respect to CLIPS object-oriented capabilities (COOL), but this is something that can be learned through CLIP's accompanying documentation. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to know more about expert systems or CLIPS.

Provided good basic understanding of AI with example program, CLIPS, enclosed( floppy disk), well written with understandable examples