"Covering the latest issues and achievements, this well documented, precisely presented text is timely and suitable for graduate and upper undergraduate students in knowledge engineering, intelligent systems, AI, neural networks, fuzzy systems, and related areas. The author's goal is to explain the principles of neural networks and fuzzy systems and to demonstrate how they can be applied to building knowledge-based systems for problem solving. Especially useful are the comparisons between different techniques (AI rule-based methods, fuzzy methods, connectionist methods, hybrid systems) used to solve the same or similar problems."