Quantum Computing: Resources for Learning
Books, lecture notes and papers
I was recently asked to lead a semester long seminar in quantum computing - a topic in which I have long been interested. The question is where to start. In this article, I’m going to describe (and provide links to) some of the resources that I plan to use or which I have referred to over the years.
I have long owned some key texts that have been important in the development of the field. These include N. David Mermin’s Quantum Computer Science (2007), Quantum Computing A Gentle Introduction (2011) by Eleanor Rieffel and Wolfgang Polak, Quantum Information Theory (2013, 2017) by Mark Wilde, and Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (2000) by Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang - the latter of which is fondly referred to as Mike and Ike. These books all contributed to the development of quantum computing and all are still relevant, but I wouldn’t recommend any of them as suitable for beginners - all assume some prior knowledge of quantum mechanics, or at least, all are most accessible by those who have some previous exposure to quantum mechanical ideas. Of these works, Rieffel and Polak’s book comes closest to being suitable for newcomers to the field.
My seminar group will include students and faculty with varying degrees of exposure to quantum mechanics. However, many beginning courses in quantum mechanics focus on solving differential equations, when quantum computing actually needs some facility with linear algebra. This means that the mathematics is accessible to many as the mathematics of quantum computing does not depend on a deep knowledge of calculus. To set the stage I’m going to ask everyone to read Quantum Computing for the Quantum Curious (2021) by Ciaran Hughes, Joshua, Isaacson, Anastasia Perry, Ranbel Sun and Jessica Turner. This book which only requires a background in high school physics is available for download as a PDF or ePub as part of Springer’s Open Access program. You can find the download links here. There are many other books available in this series - finding a listing can be difficult - you might find this link to be useful.
I have decided to build the seminar around Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach (2nd Ed. 2021) by Jack D. Hidary - it provides a well written overview of the necessary theory and reviews the appropriate mathematical background, and it provide an introduction to practical quantum computing using IBM’s Qiskit - a quantum computing dev library. I will supplement the content on using Qiskit with a variety of resources including Inbtroduction to Quantum Computing with Qiskit (2021) by Macauley Coggins, Learn Quantum Computing with Python and IBM Quantum Experience (2020) by Robert Loredo, Quantum Computing in Practice with Qiskit and IBM Quantum Experience (2020) by Hassi Norlén, and Hands-On Quantum Machine Learning with Python (Vol 1, 2021, and Vol 2, 2023) by Frank Zickert. I’m not saying that these are necessarily the best available books, they are just books that I have purchased and have found to be of some use. I anticipate that the books by Coggins and Zickert will be used most frequently.
There are some downloadable resources that are referenced in some of the above works. The Cal Tech lecture notes of John Preskill are often mentioned - you can find them here. The Waterloo notes of John Watrous are also frequently mentioned - Dr. Watrous has left academia and now works at IBM. His lecture notes and much else can be found at his website, his course on quantum computing at IBM is here. I will make use of the notes and the IBM course in the upcoming seminar series.
There are also many useful resources at arXiv, these include a draft edition of Wilde’s book, Ronald de Wolfe’s lecture notes for a Master’s level class, an interesting paper entitled Quantum algorithms for algebraic problems by Andrew Childs and Wim van Dam, and much else besides.
I have many additional resources and I will write additional overviews over the next few months, but the resources above should be enough to get most people started on the path to learning more about Quantum Computing.