Dimitri Bertsekas is McAffee Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has researched a broad variety of subjects from optimization theory, control theory, parallel and distributed computation, systems analysis, and data communication networks. He has written numerous papers in each of these areas, and he has authored or coauthored sixteen textbooks. Professor Bertsekas was awarded the INFORMS 1997 Prize for Research Excellence in the Interface Between Operations Research and Computer Science for his book "Neuro-Dynamic Programming" (co-authored with John Tsitsiklis), the 2000 Greek National Award for Operations Research, the 2001 ACC John R. Ragazzini Education Award, the 2009 INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the 2014 ACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award for "contributions to the foundations of deterministic and stochastic optimization-based methods in systems and control," the 2014 Khachiyan Prize for Life-Time Accomplishments in Optimization, and the 2015 George B. Dantzig Prize.

This 4th edition is a major revision of Vol. I of the leading two-volume dynamic programming textbook by Bertsekas, and contains a substantial amount of new material, particularly on approximate DP in Chapter 6. This chapter was thoroughly reorganized and rewritten, to bring it in line, both with the contents of Vol. II, whose latest edition appeared in 2012, and with recent developments, which have propelled approximate DP to the forefront of attention.

Some of the highlights of the revision of Chapter 6 are an increased emphasis on one-step and multistep lookahead methods, parametric approximation architectures, neural networks, rollout, and Monte Carlo tree search. Among other applications, these methods have been instrumental in the recent spectacular success of computer Go programs. The material on approximate DP also provides an introduction and some perspective for the more analytically oriented treatment of Vol. II.

The book includes a substantial number of examples, and exercises, detailed solutions of many of which are posted on the internet. It was developed through teaching graduate courses at M.I.T., and is supported by a large amount of educational material, such as slides and videos, posted at the MIT Open Courseware, the author's, and the publisher's web sites.