Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications Seventh Edition

I am satisfied with this book. It arrived promptly (thanks to Amazon's low-cost 2-day shipping) and cost a fraction of what my university bookstore charges. I saved more than $75 buying this here on Amazon.com! Anyways, about the book itself. This is a college textbook, and as such it is going to be purchased by people who are taking a class that utilizes this book. This book is designed for the first Discrete Structures class that will be taken by computer science majors. Here at the University of Arizona, that class is called CSC 245 (Intro to Discrete Structures). This book is at least as effective as any of my other college textbooks, and helps make it easier to learn this difficult material. This book is much heavier than other college textbooks I have used, and takes up a significant amount of backpack space. When I carry this around all day, I usually leave my laptop at home to save on weight.

Apparently I'm in the minority, but I really enjoyed this book. I found the author a bit wordy, but that tends to help push the ideas into my head when I'm learning. There are lots of examples and problems ( with odd-numbered solutions ), as well as a superb index, which is an underrated but essential part of any reference textbook. I really appreciated this book when I took Algorithms and Data Structures, where the text was Intro. to Algorithms by Cormen et al. That book's the standard, but it's definitely more of a reference than "learn-from" book. I found myself constantly going back to Rosen for gentler explanations of anything from time complexity to Dijkstra's algorithm.

I ordered this book for my Discrete Mathematics class and found it infinitely useful. Pros: 1. Plenty of examples and explanations of the material. 2. Hundreds of exercises ranging from the very basic to the rigorous. 3. Generally good explanations. 4. Covers everything, very in depth. Focus on both the abstract, theoretical as well as the computational and applied. Cons: 1. Some examples are not clear enough, especially to those without a strong foundation in mathematics. 2. There needs to be an answers book to complement this because some of the answers at the back are not clear enough. 3. Can get too abstract, which is uninteresting to students who just want to learn the coding elements as well as the logic. All in all, highly recommended even for leisure reading.

I purchased this book, in spite of the poor reviews, for my two discrete math courses I had to take - Intro and Discrete Math. I'm just finishing up this course, and this book has a thick layer of dust on it. The teacher in both classes teaches straight out of the book, and this makes for a terrible class! I would like to meet the author someday and have a strong word with him about how poor this textbook is for teaching discrete math. To break down why this math book is terrible, I'll describe a typical chapter in the book: Usually there are four pages for a section - not very in depth, but not terrible. Out of those pages: 2 are devoted to biographies of mathematicians that have no relevance on solving the problems in the book. 1 page is devoted to examples that are of no use. 1/2 page has some useful examples, and basic instructions to solve them 1/2 page is devoted to the most convoluted explanation of topics I've ever heard. For example, I counted 4 instances of the word "Hence" in the paragraph describing how to count the probability of a poker hand. The examples in the book have references to problems in the back of the book. This is terrible, since it forces someone reading the chapter to go to the end of the chapter to see a basic explanation of terms used in the middle of the chapter. There are numerous new concepts casually introduced in the end of chapter questions. What the heck, can't we have a paragraph describing what something is before you start asking questions on it? A typical example from the problem sets is: "38. Two events, E1 and E2 are called independent if .... For each of the following pairs of events, which are subsets of the set of all possible outcomes when a coin is tossed three times, determine whether or not they are independent.". This is just awful. The answers in the back of the book do not have a break in between them. So the answers read like this: "1. 2175.45 2. 41714 3. 55/3 4. 56.195 5. blah blah blah. 6. 62 iterations". Since there are two columns in the back of the book, it makes it impossible to read the answers for a quick check. The answers are given with no explanation, just the most reduced version of the answer sometimes, other times a non-reduced numeric version of the answer. I learned quite a bit from the lecture in class. The professor would assign problems from the book. The next class we would spend going over the questions people had on the book's problems. This would usually take most of a class period. So rather than write a book that is easy to understand and full of examples that would help people understand the material, this book is written so that a math tutor is just about required to pass the class. Don't misunderstand me, I don't hate mathematics or proofs! I've taken Calc 1,2, and 3, and the book used in those classes was fine. This book is terrible. If you want to hear about how bad this book is, please feel free to ask me questions! I feel badly for the poor freshmen buying this book at a campus bookstore before reading the reviews on Amazon. The book should be priced at about $10.

I bought this book for a course in the university. This book is easy to read, easy to understand because the writer gives an informative examples. The great thing about this book is that the book show you an applications of the materials that you learn and how they applied in computer sciences. This book will be a reference for AI, Algorithms , Discrete math, Data structures and Theory of Computation courses. every computer sciences student must read it. It's worth buying.

Just an incredible discrete text. This complimented my profs resources perfectly. Starts from nothing and builds to complex. There are personal features for relevant mathematicians in each chapter which personalize the material and assist in conceptualizing the applications.

It was on perfect conditions. Like New.

The text is a lot less money than buying it from a college book store

Great book.

Great book from secondbind!