Customer Reviews

Operations Research Problem Solver (Problem Solvers Solution Guides)

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I've used many of the REA problem solvers over the last several years when I studied math in preparation for an MS degree in Operations Research which I began in May of this year. I've always thought highly of these books and dismiss most of the criticism they sometimes receive in Amazon reviews.

This book is good, but not, in my opinion, as good as the REA books that I used for my math studies. Most of those books had some overview of the topic or technique covered as well as the solved problems themselves whereas this book has very little discussion of the idea behind a technique, focusing only on solving a specific problem. For example, there are 4 methods for detecting if a function is convex, but this book does not mention that and only illustrates two of the methods. It would have been nice to see a little bit of discussion of the convexity concept, a statement of the 4 techniques, and then an example of each.

Likewise, the chapter on Dynamic Programming has no initial discussion of the technique, assuming the reader already understands the underlying principles involved. It would have been nice to have a half of a page to maybe a full page discussing the idea of Dynamic Programming before the actual problem sets; in the math-related books, the overview was quite often a nice summary of the concepts that gave a slightly different perspective than the class textbook and sometimes promoted greater understanding of the material.

But it is still a valuable resource and I intend to use it to review for my final exam in Optimization that is being given a few weeks from now. I am certain that it will help.

This book has a lot of solved applications and examples, it is a good source to master operations research.