Discrete Optimization Algorithms: With Pascal Programs [Hardcover]

MacIej M. Syslo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1983

Upper-level undergraduates and graduate students will benefit from this treatment of discrete optimization algorithms, which covers linear and integer programming. It offers ready-to-use computer programs, together with their derivation and performance characteristics. Subjects include packing and covering, optimization on networks, and coloring and scheduling. 1983 edition.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 542 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall (August 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0132155095
• ISBN-13: 978-0132155090
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,990,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An interesting but mostly obsolete and awkward book, April 18, 2011

By 

Scott (Dubuque, IA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Discrete Optimization Algorithms: with Pascal Programs (Dover Books on Computer Science) (Paperback)

This is about my fourth and final time trying to review this clumsy book and is written on Sat 24Sep11. I recycled my copy of this book several weeks ago and bought that copy when Amazon briefly had its price below $20, the max which I would pay for it. The Dover list price is $29.95.

The subject of this book is over 25 actual programs in the now little-used Pascal programming language, which has been around since 1970. For each such program, there is much specific lead-in writing, such that the actual mathematics text portions are small and almost incidental, and are heavily mixed with all that programming info. There are a lot more exercises and lists of references than actual mathematical writing. Check the Amazon 'Look Inside' utility, recently activated for this book, and see for yourself.

This logically leads to the following situation:1) In 1983, when this book was originally published, Pascal may have yet been commonly used at universities, so the book was probably relevant. 2) By the time Dover repinted this book in 2006 and 23 years later, Pascal was slowly heading for extinction as a programming language, so now this book is almost fully obsolete. 3) Clearly this book had some reason to go out of print from its original publisher for years before Dover printed it again. Was that because Pascal was already 'hitting the skids' as a 'teaching' language in colleges in favor of the newer C++ object-oriented language or something similar? it did look like C++ was a fairly popular teaching language in the mid 1990s, at least where I live. Now Java seems to be more ascendant and has long topped the popularity list of the online TIOBE index, with C being rated 2 and C++ being rated 3. Pascal is rated 16 in that index.

If the operations research mathematics text had been written to be separate from the programming, and so readable in its own right, this could have been a reasonably good applied math textbook. However, the huge specifically Pascal-related content is fully interspersed with the math textbook, so this book seems quite ill-conceived and irrelevant by this 2011 year. In a technical sense, Dover should probably yank this book into out-of-print oblivion, but they do keep in print many even more obsolete books, so this one will probably stay around, too. Maybe this book even sells pretty well for Dover. Who knows?

Links to four actual math books I do own, which cover many of the subjects effectively missing in this book: Flows in Networks (Princeton Landmarks in Mathematics and Physics) / Linear Programming: Methods and Applications: Fifth Edition / Mathematical Programming / Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity The link 2 book by Saul Gass has probably the best overall coverage of the present book's missed opportunity at similar coverage. All but the first Princeton book are other Dover reprints.