14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
not a good book but better than nothing, April 22, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (Hardcover)
This is a pretty standard college math book. This book has its good parts and its bad parts (mostly bad parts). Some important stuff is hidden away in the questions to the sections, like the definition of "disjunctive normal form". And even then, it doesn't explain what it means clearly (luckly the teacher explained it in English). I think this book covers way too much in so little space. If you think the page count is large, you probably don't own the book. I think there should be at least twice the amount of pages for the amount of stuff it tries to cram in. The sections are hard to read and some of the proofs are hard to understand (if they prove anything at all). There are absolutely no derivations either, it's all proofs at the most. Also, there are too few examples and many of the questions are very difficult compared to the examples they give in the chapter. Speaking of examples, they don't really explain why, they just explain how. This is especially apparent in the counting and the probability theory chapters. My favorite has to be the examples in the counting chapter where they just say what is done in English and directly convert what they just said in English to a formula. I'd rather have an explaination of why they did what they did than have a formula translated directly to English.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The right mix of theory and applications., March 2, 2005
This review is from: Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (Hardcover)
Textbooks for discrete mathematics define a broad spectrum in terms of the level of difficulty. At the lower end, there are the books that present the theorems, but rarely if ever include a proof. Then, armed with the theorem, it goes on to apply the theorem to solve the appropriate problems. At the higher end, there are the books that follow the theorem-proof design, with a smaller number of applications. This one is at the higher end; there are very few theorems that are not proven.
Following the trend in computer science, the breadth of coverage in discrete mathematics has also increased over the years. This is reflected in the size of the book, the text section, without appendices, solutions and index is almost eight hundred pages. The coverage is complete, and it starts exactly where it should, with logic, basic set theory and functions. After that, there is a chapter on algorithms and matrices, one on proof strategies with induction and recursion, three chapters covering counting principles and discrete probability, and ending with chapters on relations, graphs, trees, Boolean algebra and modeling computation.
The explanations are sound, although the mathematical depth is a bit on the high end, which no doubt explains some of the very negative reviews. There are many exercises at the end of the sections and solutions to the odds are included in an appendix. In my opinion, this is an absolute necessity, I will not even consider a book that doesn't include the solutions to many of the problems. At the end of each chapter there is a set of supplementary exercises, a list of projects to be solved by writing a computer program and a list of suggested writing projects.
What I liked most about the book has nothing to do with the discrete mathematics. The author included a large number of brief biographical sketches of mathematicians. When I was looking the book over for the first time, I paged through the book reading every one the biographical shorts. Nevertheless, this is one of the better books in the field of discrete mathematics, with large amounts of time spent on both the theory and applications, it has just the right mix to satisfy both tastes.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book on Discrete Math, March 15, 2006
This review is from: Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (Hardcover)
This is the best book I have come across in Discrete Mathematics. It is fun to read and very easy to follow. The subject was taught as a very theoretical way in my course in college, but this book gave a whole new practical dimension to the topics, mainly in the chapters on Graph Theory.
It is a must buy for anybody who wants to know about the fun side of mathematics. That is not to say that this book is not suitable for the serious study program. It has everything that you may require in an Introductory Discrete Math course.
The problem sets are big and the answers to odd number questions are really helpful at times, when you are stuck. The author's detailing of almost every aspect in the book and coupled with the applications of the same idea make it easy to understand.
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and I feel anybody who goes through this book, too will enjoy it immensely.
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