The book has been primarily designed for the beginners in the subject. It has been written from the students' perspective, making it easy to understand. The contents are briefly explained with the help of examples in a direct and a pragmatic approach. Each chapter begins with the basics and is standalone; the dependence of the chapters on previous concepts has been minimized. The text is aimed to balance the mix of notation and words in mathematical statements. Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing topics are often expressed in terms of algorithms, hence key algorithms are introduced with their explanations. These algorithms are expressed in words and in an easy to understand form of structured psuedocodes. The students should easily grasp the psuedocodes used in the text to express the algorithms, regardless of whether they have formally studied programming languages.