Customer Reviews

Introduction to Graph Theory (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Level of the book: 3rd-4th year undergrad or 1st-2nd year grad (pretty big range).

Don't let other reviews fool you. This book does an excellent job covering the material at hand, especially given the task West set out to achieve. The book basically stands alone thanks to thorough appendices and a fair amount of examples, plus lots of problems (mostly proofs). Because this material is proof-based, I cannot suggest that this book could stand alone, but that someone else should review problems and such.

When I first was reading this book, I ignored the appendices, and that was my downfall. Once I started using all the tools in this book, things started coming together. Because of the intricate design, I would recommend this book only to people who are serious about a thorough introduction to graph theory. That is, actually proving many of the theorems that play a central role in this introduction. For a simple introduction to concepts, I would recommend Trudeau's book, "Introduction to Graph Theory," which is a good read and introduces a few of the ideas and definitions of graph theory, but does not focus on proofs.

My only major quarrel with this book is that it is completely void of color! This would be EXTREMELY useful in this book because many of the diagrams are complicated and different color labels would make things much clearer (instead of bolding lines and such). The increased price of the book would certainly be worth the clarity from color. There are also some typos throughout the book, but none too major (that have been noticed).

Overall, I would highly recommend this book over any other, but consider waiting until an edition with color comes out.

West is enthusiastic about graph theory. I do not recommend this book for independent study, nor would I recommend it for a first-time student of graph theory. It is called "Introduction to Graph Theory", not because it is an appropriate introductory text for new students, but because it covers a broad area of the subject. I recommend it for a student who has read at least one lower-level introductory text and would like to round out their knowledge of graph theory in a more in-depth way.
I have two problems with this book. They both stem from the fact that it reads more like a collection of journal articles than like a cohesive text book. One is that his notation is very specific--he does not always use the most common form of notation, and this means that dipping into the book is difficult. The second problem for me is that West defines many things that I do not feel need defining. Rather than using a short description of a certain type of graph whenever he refers to it, he will give it a label. Again, this makes dipping into his text rather difficult, especially since many of the things he defines are not generally given a definition. Both of these would be perfectly reasonable for a journal article, but seem rather out of place in a large textbook--his definitions particularly clutter up his work. Perhaps West is more used to writing papers than textbooks.
Having said that, West is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic. His exercises are wonderful, marked with a (-) for easy, a (+) for difficult, a (!) for particularly instructive, and a (*) for problems based on optional material. Several of the (!) problems I have worked required me to actually look up the paper that they are based on for the final solution--which is possible due to his excellent citations. His index of works cited is an education in itself, and any student wishing to pursue a specific area in greater depth will find his book an wonderful gateway.

My perspective: I am an undergraduate student doing summer research in graph theory, working under a professor.

The treatment is logically rigorous and impeccably arranged, yet, ironically, this book suffers from its best feature: it is comprehensive. As a book becomes more encyclopedic, it becomes less useful for pedagogy. Introduction to Graph Theory is somewhere in the middle. It is an adequate reference work and an adequate textbook. Steering a middle course, the book is bound to dissatisfy people with specific needs, but readers needing both a reference and a text will find the book satisfying.

If you buy it for pedagogical purposes, be prepared to consult other works for a more intuitive approach. Introduction to Graph Theory presents few models, relying instead on logically rigorous development. Personally, I'm for both, but that takes up space, meaning less material can be covered.

I'm glad I bought the book, and I will keep it for a future reference.

Some of the criticisms leveled at West's book by other reviewers focus on either the errors that appear in the book or the choice of material. To the former concern, I would certainly add my own lamentations about the errors in the book, but note that in learning from this text I did not find the errors grevious at all and West's web page is a good guide to reading around them if you find something that cannot easily be interpreted from context (which I could not). However, the later concern I see as too nitpicking, as the book does a good job of familiarizing the reader with a large breadth of topics, to be chosen at the instructor's disscression. Just covering some subset of the book proved to be more than enough material for a challenging and well-paced one semester class, as the book was intended. I found West's literary style eminently readible, and more to the point I have been able to go on in Graph Theory with an excellent preperation thanks to West's book, which I see as the real measure of an introductory text.
The only real negative to the book is the short shrift given to more modern topics such as spectral methods and more extremal questions. The author feels a need to cram in this material, but at the cost of readability and scope. However, these topics are really not within the purvue of an undergraduate graph theory text, so I don't feel that this seriously detracts from the quality of the book. For a wonderful text on modern graph theory appropriate for a graduate student, however, let me cast my vote for Bollobas' aptly named "Modern Graph Theory".

I can't recommend West's text enough. It is modern and well written, and it serves as a great introduction to a wonderful field of mathematics.

We used this for a Computer Science class on Graph Theory, and I remember more than one student complaining about the book. Generally speaking, what people found most disconcerting about the text was its level of abstraction, and "lack of motivation" for the theorems provided. In my experience, these complaints are frequently leveled by non-mathematicians at books that are clearly NOT non-mathematical; West's book falls into this category. This is, first and foremost, a book for mathematicians.

As pointed out by other reviewers, the book isn't perfect. There are a lot of errors, although you can obviously deal with these if you read the errata. West also has the habit of sometimes presenting a theorem completely out of the blue, which can cause some confusion. That said, the book does a very good job overall. Graph theory is an exceptionally beautiful subject, but it's easy to obscure that in a theorem/proof/theorem didactic haze. West has an agenda, and therefore the book has a discernible structure, which brings out the beauty of the area. The chapters on coloring and planar graphs are particularly strong, although the most interesting chapter for me was the one on additional topics; the sections on matroids, Ramsey theory, random graphs and spectral graph theory, while far from comprehensive, provide good introductions. Another strong aspect of the book are the exercises; these range from very easy to very difficult, the latter being from major papers in graph theory. The hints section at the end of the book is quite helpful here.

Overall, a very good book. I didn't know anything about graph theory before I started reading it, but I had a professor to help me through the rough spots, so perhaps it's not exactly ideal for self-study. If you've been exposed to the basics before though, it's definitely worth taking a look at.

I had to purchase two of Prof. West's books. This one and the Mathematical Thinking book. Prof. West is not very competent in writing textbooks. He gives incomplete explanations of the very basic terms. His path to explain simple things to hard things is usually very random with completely random thoughts and observations in the middle of explanations (sometimes this creates a problem because you cannot always see "them" as a beginner). His explanations and proofs lack one thing that mathematics always preaches: parsimony, clarity, and elegance. Even his colleagues at UIUC criticizes the way he writes textbooks. If you are new to graph theory and if you buy this book, you'll definitely need to check definitions and explanations from either another textbook or from the Internet. He makes a mess out of the subject matter he is trying to introduce. I would not recommend this book at all.

An excellent book on graph theory. Very detailed, and a little over my head at this point, but I'm sure it'll be fully intelligible by the end of my class.

the book was not what he described. the book was not original and I had lots of problems to return the book

I know several graph theory textbooks available to teach graph theory from (actually almost all of them are listed in the Introduction of Doug West's book). In my view there is no better text for an introductory undergraduate/graduate level course then this one. It seems to me that most of the criticisms in the negative reviews are coming for disappointed students who are looking for excuses for their poor performance in class, and who were unable to get the essence of graph theory for some reason (perhaps due to an incompetent instructor). Blaming the book and its author is just ignorance from their part.

For me as a teacher a good textbook means up to date material, clear structuring, flexibility to select among the subjects, and carefully assembled sets of Exercises with hints and solutions. Doug West has these objectives in mind being an excellent teacher and researcher of the field. His book is a possible realization of those objectives, and obviously not a "perfect" one. But this book is alive in the sense that constructive criticism is welcomed by the author and incorporated into further editions. And I am sure there will be further editions and there will be further improvements.

This is the first Graph Theory book I've read, as it was assigned for my class. Therefore, I don't have an expansive frame of reference to tell how this comares to other textbooks on the subject.

However, I don't quite unerstand the frustration of many here. I'm assuming many had the first edition of the book, which was apparently rife with many errors. I personally only found one error in one of the proofs, and I'm still not certain whether it was actually an error or a misreading. This does coincide with one of the criticisms of the book, in which many of the proofs are very hard to follow, sometimes needlessly so. It would have been a lot easier to do the proofs in more of a bullet point fashion as opposed to several long, descriptive sentences.

The problems were very good, with a range of challenging to bash your head on the desk difficult. There were plenty of examples strewn over the text, especially for the more complicated proofs.

The range of data to tear through is formidible. This touches on all the important sections of Graph Theory as well as some of the more obscure uses. Lond story short, if this is your assigned textbook for a class, it's not half bad. I could have probably understood most of what was taught in my class by reading the book, but would certainly be no expert, so it's a relatively solid academic work.