Quantum Computing Fundamentals, 1e Paperback – 1 March 2022

As someone working in QIC, I had high hopes from this book. From the topics advertised, I even thought it can be an effective successor to Nielsen and Chuang.Here’s the thing- Chuck Easttom is a great classical cryptographer, but he is no quantum physicist, and the entire book is a testament to the simple fact that short of someone putting a gun to his head ( or the contract being too juicy) he had no business writing this book. Topological Quantum Computation explained in three lines, Braid groups explained in five lines, Gottesman Knill theorem in four lines - none of them better than meaningless gibberish to a beginner, and all of them infuriatingly badly written for the expert, even a half-decent Wikipedia editor would cringe at this level of superficiality. You sometimes wonder whether these buzzwords were drawn up by the publisher to generate more sales by advertising that the book covers these things.Where the book is actually quite nice (And hence two stars) is chapter 10 onwards, where Chuck discusses cryptography. Here he is an undisputed expert and it shows, his writing actually becomes enjoyable. If you want a semi informal introduction to some cryptography techniques - the book is actually quite nice. But I suspect the majority of the readers buying this book would want a lot more than that. And there the book simply falls flat. It doesn’t even cover quantum error correction or fault tolerance in any readable detail (apart from dropping technical jargon reg stabilizer formalism, presumably to impress readers). And although it discusses the famous quantum algorithms, the discussion is muddled at best.In summary, read only if are a quantum physicist looking to learn some classical cryptography. Otherwise Nielsen Chuang also has an Indian edition and Kitaev’s cheap book is actually readable. For Q#, there are lots of online resources. Don’t waste money on this.