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Discrete Mathematics and its Applications

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Title: Discrete Mathematics and its Applications
by Kenneth H. Rosen
ISBN: 0-07-242434-6
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math
Pub. Date: 09 September, 2002
Format: Hardcover
Volumes: 1
List Price(USD): $126.40

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Average Customer Rating: 3.04 (51 reviews)

Customer Reviews

Rating: 1
Summary: book is good enough for me to fail my class
Comment:

if you know your instructor is going to use this book in his course, stay away from this class. If you are really good at math, and had some programming experiences before, go ahead buy this text and spend mega hours in your life. If you really have to buy the text, try to bug your instructor and TA all the time to ensure a passing grade. My instructor actually declared that he won't teach again with this text.

Rating: 4
Summary: Instructive, informative and a wealth of information
Comment: First some background: I'm not a math major or someone with a lot of experience in math. I can't speak about the usefulness or benefit of this book as an introduction to more advanced dicrete math topics because I've never studied anything more advanced. What I can tell you is that I used this book a couple of years ago when I returned to school after 20 years to finish my Bachelor's degree. I found the book useful and quite adequate to learn the basics of the subject, and this book was one of the reasons Discrete became my favorite math class. There is a ton of material packed in between the covers -- mathematics history, biographical sketches, spartan but helpful illustrations, web links, additional book and periodical resources -- everything you need to get through the course and more.

Be warned though -- the first two or three chapters are kind of dry and difficult. Rosen explains things, but he doesn't spoon feed you. There's quite a bit of vocabulary and new ideas to digest; mathematical induction is just plain hard to understand in the beginning and it takes quite a while (and a lot of practice) to learn to construct well-formed proofs. Do yourself a favor and spend the extra money on the solution manual. What you don't understand just by reading the text is usually, though not always, made much clearer by working through the problems while reviewing the answers with the solution process laid out for you. WORK A LOT OF PROBLEMS. You will never really understand the concepts or retain the information without spending hours wrestling with this stuff. This isn't Art Appreciation 101 or Intro to Government. You're not going to grasp everything just by attending class and (maybe) reading the book. You've got to do some real analytical processing and wear out some erasers. You can fake your way through some classes, but this isn't one of them.

Once you get through the first three chapters, the rest of the book goes much more smoothly. Maybe you're acclimated to the subject by this time and it just comes to you easier. If you're like me, you should really begin enjoying things at this time and seeing how this can actually be useful in terms of understanding computation and computer science. You also begin to appreciate the organizational and teaching style of the book. It progresses at a good pace, but provides enough intoductory information and exercises to keep you from feeling like a complete idiot once you reach the more advanced sections in the chapter. Sure, there are some rough spots and a few sections that you just have to re-read several times. This IS a math text -- you can't expect it to be a page-turner like a good novel.

For those reviewers who think this book is too theoretical or too terse or just a pile of proofs thrown on top of each other, they need to open some of the other higher level math books out there. This book may not be perfect, but it was pure joy compared to my nightmare experience with numerical analysis (Numerical Analysis and Methods by Epperson). As for the cost, the book is way over-priced, but then what text book isn't? It just comes with the territory.

Rating: 2
Summary: not a good book but better than nothing
Comment: This is a pretty standard college math book. This book has its good parts and its bad parts (mostly bad parts). Some important stuff is hidden away in the questions to the sections, like the definition of "disjunctive normal form". And even then, it doesn't explain what it means clearly (luckly the teacher explained it in English). I think this book covers way too much in so little space. If you think the page count is large, you probably don't own the book. I think there should be at least twice the amount of pages for the amount of stuff it tries to cram in. The sections are hard to read and some of the proofs are hard to understand (if they prove anything at all). There are absolutely no derivations either, it's all proofs at the most. Also, there are too few examples and many of the questions are very difficult compared to the examples they give in the chapter. Speaking of examples, they don't really explain why, they just explain how. This is especially apparent in the counting and the probability theory chapters. My favorite has to be the examples in the counting chapter where they just say what is done in English and directly convert what they just said in English to a formula. I'd rather have an explaination of why they did what they did than have a formula translated directly to English.

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	Title: Student's Solutions Guide for use with Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications by Kenneth H. Rosen, Kenneth Rosen ISBN: 0072474777 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Higher Education Pub. Date: 25 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $43.00
	Title: Student Solutions Guide for Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications by Kenneth H. Rosen ISBN: 0072899069 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $41.20
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