Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Introductory Discrete Mathematics (Dover Books on Mathematics) by V. K. Balakrishnan ISBN: 0-486-69115-2 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 June, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.6 (5 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Avoid this book, droogs
Comment: I've taken a first semester Discrete Math course, and am currently taking the second semester of it. I bought this book on a whim, hoping it might supplement my text, or at least clarify a few points. It fails at both of those things. Here's why:
1) Abundant errors: I read the first 15 pages and found at least one *serious* typo per page (i.e. a typo that could impede learning). Plus, the grammar ranges from illegal to ambiguous. Thankfully, I was familiar with all of the material that I was reading -- were I not, severe confusion and discouragement would have been the result.
2) Poor examples: They're too abstract or too simple -- and there aren't even very many of them. Oftentimes, he contradicts what he's trying to illustrate due to a small oversight or typo. It's truly bad.
3) Gratuitous brevity (yes I know that may sound paradoxical): The author uses compound sentences in his definitions; sometimes going as far as to define two or three concepts IN THE SAME SENTENCE! It's infuriating.
4) Chapter Zero: This deserves its own rant section. Chapter zero contains nearly all of the material from the first four chapters of my current textbook: Logic, Set theory, Induction, Relations, etc. Somehow the author crams all of it into about 24 pages (plus 4 or 5 pages of exercises). He fails at clarity or lucidity. It's an ambomination -- it reads like lecture notes (you know, the ones only the professor looks at).
OK -- I WANTED to like this book. It's kind of cute, I'll admit it. And the price is sweet. But friends, you get what you pay for. Even after I came across the first 5 or so serious typos I was willing to forgive. Eventually, the sheer amount of contradictory examples and ambiguous sentences riled me up so much that I considered tearing the book in half. Really. I doubt I'll ever open the thing again.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent Text
Comment: As with any Dover text, it is important to remember that this text is designed to teach the material, not to coddle the reader. This text provides broad and deep coverage of the various topics that fall under discrete mathematics (set theory, boolean logic, graph theory, etc.) with clarity and simplicity. This book is not designed to help you pass a test, but is instead designed to help you grasp and understand the topic, which it does very well. Easily the best book I own on this topic (I often joke that the author covered my first semester course on discrete math in the first chapter!).
Rating: 2
Summary: Too succinct for the discrete novice
Comment: I learned much more from the Schaum's Outline (ISBN: 0070380457 -Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Discrete Mathematics (Schaum's Outline Series) by Seymour Lipschutz, Marc Lipson (Contributor), Seymour Lipschultz ).
That book overcomes the two shortcomings of this one: for a self-proclaimed introductory work on discrete mathematics, this text contains too few worked out in-chapter examples, and too many omitted steps in the reasoning. On this latter point, there were many times my reading brought me to the phrase "It follows from the definition that..." or "obviously..." when, for me, it didn't follow, or it wasn't obvious. Contrary to another reviewer's assessment, I found quite a lot of typos, but none too serious. To its credit, the book does contain a lot of end-of-chapter problems with solutions, and it is inexpensive.
The author of the text I review here wrote another in this field, the Schaum's outline series offering with ISBN 007003575X, which is not the Schaum's text I recommend above. I express no opinion on this other work of his.
 |
Title: Schaum's Outline of Discrete Mathematics (Schaum's) by Seymor Lipschutz, Marc Lipson, Seymor Lipschutz, Marc Lipson ISBN: 0070380457 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: A First Course in Discrete Mathematics (Springer Undergraduate Mathematics Series) by Ian Anderson ISBN: 1852332360 Publisher: Springer-Verlag Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
