Book excerpt: This book presents in their basic form the most important models of computation, their basic programming paradigms, and their mathematical descriptions, both concrete and abstract. Each model is accompanied by relevant formal techniques for reasoning on it and for proving some properties. After preliminary chapters that introduce the notions of structure and meaning, semantic methods, inference rules, and logic programming, the authors arrange their chapters into parts on IMP, a simple imperative language; HOFL, a higher-order functional language; concurrent, nondeterministic and interactive models; and probabilistic/stochastic models. The authors have class-tested the book content over many years, and it will be valuable for graduate and advanced undergraduate students of theoretical computer science and distributed systems, and for researchers in this domain. Each chapter of the book concludes with a list of exercises addressing the key techniques introduced, solutions to selected exercises are offered at the end of the book.