Teach Yourself Logic, again
There’s an even bigger, even better, shiny new Version 10.0 of the TYL Study Guide now available at the usual URL http://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/ Form an orderly queue …
The structure of the Guide has significantly changed again (hence the jump in version number). The key section on basic first-order logic at the beginning of the mathematical logic chapter was getting more and more sprawling: it has now been hived off into a separate chapter, divided into sections, and further expanded. My sense is that quite a few readers are particularly interested in getting advice on this first step after baby logic, so nearly all the effort in this particular revision of the Guide has been concentrated on making improvements here. So, inter alia, there are new comments on four outstanding relatively elementary books: Derek Goldrei’s Propositional and Predicate Calculus, Melvin Fitting’s First-Order Logic and Automated Theorem Proving, Raymond Smullyan’s Logical Labyrinths, and (not least) Jan von Plato’s very recent Elements of Logical Reasoning.
I still intend sometime to return to say more about the last of these when I’ve had a chance to re-read it: it is in many ways a very welcome addition to the literature. For the moment, I just remark that this book is based on the author’s introductory lectures. I rather suspect that without his lectures and classroom work to round things out, the fairly bare bones presented here in a relatively short compass would be quite tough as a first introduction, as von Plato talks about a number of variant natural deduction and sequent calculi. But suppose you have already met one system of natural deduction, and (still a beginner) want to know rather more about ‘proof-theoretic’ aspects of this and related systems. Suppose, for example, that you want to know about variant ways of setting up ND systems, about proof-search, about the relation with so-called sequent calculi, etc. Then this is a very clear, very approachable and interesting book. Experts will see that there are some novel twists, with deductive systems tweaked to have some very nice features: beginners will be put on the road towards understanding some of the initial concerns and issues in proof theory.
