Customer Reviews

Discrete Mathematics (Oxford Science Publications)

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Dr. Biggs' book is an excellent introduction to discrete maths--I used it for the first term and part of the second term of his "Introduction to Pure Maths". The book reads the same as he lectures, which, while sometimes creepy (it's like he's talking to you), is a very good thing. It is very well written and explains everything clearly. He has plenty of worked examples to illustrate how to use what he has taught as well as exercises (w/ answers in the back of the book) for students to work out for themselves.

This was the required text in a course I just took in discrete mathematics, and it is very lacking. The descriptions are not detailed enough for first-time learners of the material. Biggs tries to cover very many topics, and as such, doesn't cover any given topic thoroughly. The book feels like random snapshots of various components of discrete mathematics, but not all of the snapshots are representative of the topics to which they belong.

For one group of chapters, Biggs discusses things which are only really relevant or applicable in computer science (or, at the very least, given a computer). This is to be expected - discrete mathematics and computer science go hand in hand. Unfortunately, though, it does not appear that he is a practicing computer scientist - he omits the names behind some of the famous algorithms, i.e. Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm and Prim's minimum spanning tree algorithm. He ditches the minimum spanning tree problem and proceeds to DFS without discussing Kruskal's algorithm. He also performs heap sort with a min order heap, sorting elements in ascending order, which, as most computer science students should be able to recognize, requirs linear-order extra space in order to copy the final array (as opposed to using a max-order heap, which requires only constant space). He uses a seemingly FORTRAN-based pseudocode, but omits symbols, adds more English words (as if FORTRAN didn't have enough), and uses no comments.

All in all, avoid this book if possible. For introductory-level discrete mathematics, I would recommend Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, which still sits on my shelf and serves as a great quick reference. For introductory-level data structures and algorithms, I would *highly* recommend Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C++ (3rd Edition), which has extensive diagrams, examples, analyses, proofs, and even some fully coded implementations to help jump-start readers as they get more comfortable with ADT use (also available for C and Java). However, no book is ever a substitute for going to school :-P.

I hope the Biggs book is never mandatory for any of your classes.

Cheers!

I bought this book for my first year at university. It is a good book, clear and concise, and altought I bought a used one (second edition) it was like a new one, so I'm very happy. :)

I'm not so sure that any of the editors or writers themselves spell-checked ANYTHING at all in this book. In my first day of using it for my Discrete Mathematics class I found a typo (the word "construct" was spelled "contruct") as well as a confirmed error in the answers to the practice questions. This book is also terribly organized and very sparse in information. Find a different Discrete Math book if you really want to learn this subject.

I like it, but I think there are better ways of teaching Discrete Maths. I can tell you that you discovered me the difference between Calculus and Discrete Maths. That's cool!!