Customer Reviews

Ramsey Theory, 2nd Edition

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This book is pretty nice; it covers many of the central advances in modern combinatorics, which would otherwise be hard to find in a single place. It doesn't contain anything new, but it does a good job getting the content across.

However, for some inexplicable reason, Wiley Interscience seem to hate their readership, and have foisted on us a completely absurd US$ 147 price tag on a 200-page book, which, discounting reproductions of classical papers (Ramsey and Erdos-Szekeres) and bibliography, boasts 180 pages of actual content.

Honestly, what is the point of having a convenient, unified and concise reference on combinatorics, if with the same amount of cash I can buy three or four full-sized books and have about a third of a very respectable combinatorics *library*? It should set off everybody's spider-sense that this book costs almost twice as much as "Additive Combinatorics" (Tao & Vu), which is 2.5 times longer, 15 years more up-to-date, covers at least half the material in "Ramsey Theory", and actually invites you to participate in the goings-on (i.e. has exercises, and excellent ones at that).

For US$ 20 this might have been an excellent buy.