In this best‎-selling text‎,‎ Mike Schneider and Judy Gersting unify and lend relevance to the topics of computer science within their proven framework of a six‎-layer hierarchy of abstractions‎.‎ The authors begin by showing that computer science is the study of algorithms‎,‎ which is the central theme of the book‎,‎ then move up the next five levels of the hierarchy‎:‎ hardware‎,‎ virtual machine‎,‎ software‎,‎ applications‎,‎ and ethics‎.‎ Each layer in the hierarchy builds upon the ideas and concepts presented in earlier chapters‎.‎ In addition to some motivational applications such as Web page design and interactive graphics‎,‎ the book covers the fundamental issues of algorithms‎,‎ hardware design‎,‎ computer organization‎,‎ system software‎,‎ language models‎,‎ theory of computation‎,‎ and social and ethical issues of computing‎.‎ Exposure to these deeper and more complex core ideas introduces students to the richness and beauty of the field and helps them appreciate the principles behind their creation and implementation‎.‎ While feeling the excitement of computer science‎,‎ students receive a solid grounding in the central concepts as well as in important uses of computing and information technology‎.‎