Customer Reviews

Mathematical Structures for Computer Science

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This book will leave you high and dry on many occassions. Gersting explains the obvious in each section with her practice problems and then throws problems that are impossible to do without an extra book at the end of each section. Unless you have a very good professor that notices and makes up for the grey areas in this book, you are in big trouble my friend. Discrete Math is a fun subject, this book makes it a total hassle.

This book struggles to keep its size manageable, but the effort to do so results in explanations that are unintelligible, incomplete, and often inconsistent, if not outright incorrect. The book's approach is that once a topic has been introduced, there is never any need to provide any back-reference to the subject when it is used again, even if that occurs 4 or 5 chapters later. As a result, the reader spends most of the time looking for obscure paragraphs that appear in a previous chapter, but which are essential to the understanding of the current chapter. Explanations are incomplete. While algorithms are presented (in more-or-less Pascal-ish format) for some concepts, the pseudocode used is not adequate to allow for coding of the solution, and the text accompanying the algorithms does not define many of the variables or processes that are needed to run through the algorithm. In addition, tables and diagrams used in the discourse are separated inconveniently from the text itself, causing the reader to have to turn back or forward a page or two while trying not to lose the train of thought. If required to use this textbook in a class, be ready for significant amounts of frustration unless your instructor is capable of delivering high-quality teaching of the subject, because you probably cannot learn the subject from the book itself. If you are looking for a book for professional use, there are others much better. The time needed to look something up and get a complete and understandable reference is not worth the effort.

With all due respect to some of the other reviewers, I found this book extremely helpful and extremely well written. Much of the polarity in the reviews may stem from the fact that different people have different learning models and corresponding expectations. As a career changer with several degrees in other engineering disciplines, I found many of the explanations very helpful and very appropriate relative to my current learning/retraining objectives. With the examples and practice problems, this book provides what I believe to be an excellent introduction to a wide range of topics relating to the mathematical basis for computer science. I find that I typically consult this book first before moving to other more rigorous (and often more obscure) treatments of the same topics.

Although there is now consensus over the coverage in a first course in discrete mathematics, the level of difficulty one finds in books for this audience has a wide range. Some opt for the basic approach, with very little rigor, and anything labeled as a proof is either trivial or an advanced waving of the hands. Notational complexity is kept to a minimum, which is fine for the beginner, but limits the value as the student goes on into more advanced courses. On the other end, there are those where rigorous proofs abound, it reads more like a book for traditional math majors rather than one largely designed for computer science majors.
While Gersting is somewhere in the middle, the slant is more towards the advanced. The first four chapters cover logic, the fundamentals of proofs, set theory and relations and functions respectively. This order is in complete agreement with my beliefs. I would not give any book that does not start with these basic topics a second look much less consider adopting it. Graphs are covered in chapters five and six; Boolean algebra in seven and the theory of computation is covered in chapter eight. The treatment is on the high end, but still within the bounds of a first course in discrete mathematics. Worked examples are everywhere and a large number of exercises are at the end of each section. Practice problems are embedded inside the chapters and solutions to all the practice problems are found in an appendix.
While I believe I have found a better book to use in my discrete class, this one is my second choice. In fact I successfully used it for two years, until I replaced it. The primary reasons for the change was that the new book has biographical sketches of mathematicians (something I adore), the font is larger and there are more solutions to the exercises.

I suffered through the first few weeks of my Discrete Mathematics course, and got my first C on an assignment EVER. This immediately sent up red flags. I was struggling to understand the concepts as presented in this book, despite that I have had no problem understanding Algebra, Trgonometry and Calculus. On a hunch that the book might be bad, I checked Amazon, and now you are seeing what I saw: low ratings!

I ordered Susanna Epp's book, and for the remainder of the course I read her coverage of a topic, and used this book only for the class-assigned homework problems. My grades are back to A's. So, it wasn't just me. It was this horrible book. The author just doesn't communicate the topics in a way that can be understood by those new to the subject. There are many cases of terms used without being defined, and concepts being refered to that have not yet been introduced (in other words, out-of-order presentation of topics). Worse than this, the step-by-step examples tend to use only the simplest cases, yet more difficult cases appear in the chapter exercises. In most of the text, the concept is explained, and then the student is asked to apply it (as an exercise) without an example, and expected to flip to the back of the book if they need to see the solution.

If you are stuck with this as I required textbook, I pity you. Get Susanna Epp's book (Or Rosen's) if you'd like to actually learn the topic.

Ink must be expensive because this text is almost completely devoid of examples. There are a few basic superficial examples in each chapter, but nothing detailed and nothing that links them concretely to the chapter assignments. I also found the text lacked detail/depth in its explanations of complex subjects. It would be helpful if there were hints for some of the more difficult odd numbered problems. The text would also greatly benefit from a student solutions manual.

I've seen a few crummy text books in my time, but this one takes the cake. We are using it for an introduction to discrete math class, and it is nowhere near appropriate for introductory level. I am fairly sure the authors don't understand the subject well enough to write in an explanatory manner, and it reads as though it was translated into English through BabelFish. It is one thing to be able to discuss a subject among your peers, and it is another thing entirely to be able to make it accessible to anyone, and that is where this book fails horribly. If you have to buy this book for an introductory course, do yourself a favor and buy one of those Schaum's 2000 solved problem books, I've been able to learn all the material simply be following a problem and its solution and then doing the rest on my own. Ham handed explanations are no substitute for old fashioned practice with the materials.

I am currently in a Discrete Mathematics course (Spring 2010) using the 6th Edition Gersting text. It is a very hard read with few examples to get you going on the concepts and a "leave it up to you to figure it out" attitude. When introducing new ideas that most of us are hearing for the first time, this text is no hand-holder! I really don't care if it's a IEEE foundational text or not, it is not geared for the beginning student in a entry-level college course. I did well in all my Calculus courses but his text makes me feel like a moron. As a point, early in the text, she proves one example using the previous example. However, if you didn't get the first example, you surely won't understand anything else. Unfortunately, I have to use this text and its exercises for my class but I use Susanna Epp's 3rd Edition Discrete Math book for understanding and I can work the problems in the Gersting text without even opening it now!

-Marshall Lewis (a real college student trying to get a decent grade!)

I was forced to buy this book for class. The first 100 pages have been useless for me. I can't understand why my school is using it. From this point, I'll be reading a Discrete book my wife used 5+ years ago and I'll just work the required problems in this text.

I used this book in my Data Structures class. It has sample problems with solutions in the back of the book so you understand what they were talking about (unfortunately, I cannot say the same for a lot of data structures texts) The sample problems were also good for review for an exam. This was one of the few Computer Science textbooks that I have actually kept as a reference.