Discrete Mathematics, 2nd Edition

I bought this book for a college course I'm currently enrolled in, and for the price I paid, I am impressed. I was scared to buy a used book online but it's in great condition for being used. It also came faster than originally anticipated, which was phenomenal.

This is the kind of math you do on the side and on the down low.....your side math.

I like this book in that it is concise and does a pretty good job of explaining concepts. However, it is very lacking in worked-through examples which is why I give it the three star rating

I bought this book for my first year at university. It is a good book, clear and concise, and altought I bought a used one (second edition) it was like a new one, so I'm very happy. :)

very good

This was the required text in a course I just took in discrete mathematics, and it is very lacking. The descriptions are not detailed enough for first-time learners of the material. Biggs tries to cover very many topics, and as such, doesn't cover any given topic thoroughly. The book feels like random snapshots of various components of discrete mathematics, but not all of the snapshots are representative of the topics to which they belong. For one group of chapters, Biggs discusses things which are only really relevant or applicable in computer science (or, at the very least, given a computer). This is to be expected - discrete mathematics and computer science go hand in hand. Unfortunately, though, it does not appear that he is a practicing computer scientist - he omits the names behind some of the famous algorithms, i.e. Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm and Prim's minimum spanning tree algorithm. He ditches the minimum spanning tree problem and proceeds to DFS without discussing Kruskal's algorithm. He also performs heap sort with a min order heap, sorting elements in ascending order, which, as most computer science students should be able to recognize, requirs linear-order extra space in order to copy the final array (as opposed to using a max-order heap, which requires only constant space). He uses a seemingly FORTRAN-based pseudocode, but omits symbols, adds more English words (as if FORTRAN didn't have enough), and uses no comments. All in all, avoid this book if possible. For introductory-level discrete mathematics, I would recommend Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications , which still sits on my shelf and serves as a great quick reference. For introductory-level data structures and algorithms, I would *highly* recommend Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C++ (3rd Edition) , which has extensive diagrams, examples, analyses, proofs, and even some fully coded implementations to help jump-start readers as they get more comfortable with ADT use (also available for C and Java). However, no book is ever a substitute for going to school :-P. I hope the Biggs book is never mandatory for any of your classes. Cheers!

I'm not so sure that any of the editors or writers themselves spell-checked ANYTHING at all in this book. In my first day of using it for my Discrete Mathematics class I found a typo (the word "construct" was spelled "contruct") as well as a confirmed error in the answers to the practice questions. This book is also terribly organized and very sparse in information. Find a different Discrete Math book if you really want to learn this subject.

It is well organized and neatly written. Lack of good examples and applications of concepts. This book is for pure mathematics.

離散数学の入門書として最適であると思う． 同じジャンルの本は数多く出版されているが，それらはLogicやアルゴリズムを中心に構成されていることが多い．この本の特徴は，数え上げや代数的構造を中心とした構成になっているところであると思う．そのため好みによって評価が分かれるかも知れない． 記述は比較的易しく，読みやすいので，学部学生のテキストとして，また自習用として非常に良い本であると思う．

As the blurb and some official reviews say, the expository is certainly clear. It's been over 20 years since I've studied mathematics, so I've forgotten plenty of the foundational concepts, and the book doesn't take a step back to help in those cases. But it does guide you through step-by-step in a way that doesn't leave you behind much anyway. It makes use of visual support and provides concrete examples where possible. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how well it guides you through the complexities. Unfortunately, one of the keys to really understanding it all is trying it out and then checking answers to confirm understanding or correct misunderstanding. You can't reliably do that with this book, as half the answers are missing. Two examples (but the same is true for all later chapters as well): For exercise 1.7's five questions: there are proper answers for Q1, 4 and 5. No answer is given for 2 at all. And for Q3 it simply says "see 1.4.3". If you understood the section 1.4.3, you would get Q3 right without much that. If you didn't understand 1.4.3 (or misunderstood it), it doesn't help you correct your answer at all. For exercise 2.4's seven questions: there are proper answers for Q2 and Q5. There's a fuzzy answer for Q6. There are no answers for Qs 1, 3, 4 and 7. At the beginning of the answer key section, it claims that further discussions and solutions can be found on the companion website. However, for the units in the examples above, the PDFs on that webiste include solutions only up to 1.6 and up to 2.3, respectively. So the website seems to literally include solutions for everything *except* the questions that have missing solutions in the book.

Come si fa a recensire un libro sulla materia più noiosa, il libro è ottimo e ben scritto è solo l'argomento difficile digerire

The best book you can have if you are passionate about Abstract Mathematics :)

As expected.