Applied Discrete Structures

Reviewed by Hellen Colman, Professor, City Colleges of Chicago on 4/11/22

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The text covers all areas in our Discrete Mathematics course appropriately and provides a useful index.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

This book is well written and rigorous while at the same time does a good job of motivating the material.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

Content is up-to-date and revised often.

Clarity rating: 5

Well written and all notations are introduced before using them.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is consistent and follows the logical outline of most Discrete Math courses.

Modularity rating: 5

The text is well organized. The clickable expandable examples and exercises provide options for different reading levels.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The flow is logical, except maybe with the exception of the chapter on Matrix Algebra that could be moved to the appendices at the end.

Interface rating: 4

The text is free of significant interface issues, including navigation problems. There are some distortion of some images in the Graphs chapter. The book may benefit from a more standardized way to unify the representations of graphs, Hasse diagrams, lattices, etc.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I did not find grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

I did not find the text culturally insensitive or offensive in any way.

Comments

The inclusion of SageMath notes in this textbook when Sage was first released was the reason for which I chose this book originally many years ago. It is an excellent example of successful integration of open source software in an open source textbook. With the different editions, these SageMath Notes have been expanded and they populate now most of the chapters of this book. It is great addition that rounds and expands its content.

Reviewed by David Busekist, Instructor, Southeastern Louisiana University on 6/20/17

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

The material adequately covers the subject and there is a reliable glossary and index.
As a text for an entry level survey class, it includes more than would generally be expected of a beginning college freshman.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

There are no major contextual errors in the text. There are places where concepts are assumed to be in possession of the students without benefit of coverage
No discussion of parallel or perpendicular lines in linear equations; the notation 3/2x is confusing for slope, (3/2)x would be better
Terminology of matrices (rows and columns) is assumed
Assumes familiarity with graphing linear inequalities with no development and doesn’t address “test points”
Does not address any finance operations involving unknown times or number of periods of awarding interest
Uses three separate, unrelated notations for complements of sets
Error on page 221 – P(E | F is missing a closing parenthesis
Error on page 225 – centering for P(E | F) = P(E) for consistency
Error on page 279 – P(Walked Wednesday | Bicycled Monday) is not 3/5/16 and Bicycled misspelled in the next line (Bicycleed)

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The material is up-top-date with only minor references to “dated” entities in applications (Ma Bell and Pa Bell in Markov Chains); the necessary changes would be quickly and easily made

Clarity rating: 5

As far as a mathematics text goes, it is remarkably readable; there is minimal use of “technical jargon” beyond what is necessary to the material

Consistency rating: 5

Language and content are consistent with other traditional texts; the framework and presentation, except where noted above flow well and topics are tied together as necessary

Modularity rating: 5

There is little need to artificially subdivide given that the material is already fairly well sectioned out with topics appropriately arranged and flow from topic to topic is logical and developmentally arranged

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

As discussed in previous sections, the material builds logically with necessary material covered adequately in most places to build new concepts.

Interface rating: 4

There is no real “artwork” in the presentation, no pictures or photographs. Generally the tables and diagrams are well laid out (the exception being many pixilated tree diagrams and Venn diagrams in the material on Sets and Counting and Probability)

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

One noted spelling error, as noted above (page 279);

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

I find nothing in this presentation that would be offensive to anyone on the basis of race, creed, color, gender, religious or sexual preference

Comments

I chose to look at this text because I regularly teach a Finite Mathematics class to entry level freshmen. For my institution this is a survey course. Some of the latter topics are well beyond the scope that would be covered, but I find them very interesting, nonetheless.

Personally, I would like to see some “artwork” added to the presentation, but it works fine without it. I like there being both exercises and solutions for the exercises. The presentation of solutions on a separate line, sometimes centered, sometimes not, doesn’t bother me but if I was paying for printing this book, I’d like to see a different layout that would reduce the number of pages,

Reviewed by Michael Berry, Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville on 6/20/17

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

I am pleased with the coverage of material that is needed for our COSC 312 (Discrete Structures) course. Index and glossary are fine. The chapters on Matrix Algebra are not really needed for our one semester course. That material is covered in a linear algebra course offered by the Math Department.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

Content appears accurate but I did not evaluate all expressions in great detail.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

I am not convinced having the Sage programming examples is all that helpful. Our Computer Science students are taking this course the first semester of their junior year and they are already well versed in C++ and C. I think it might be more useful to have a version of the book that does not have explicit programming examples. You could generate different versions based on what open source programming languages/environments the instructor has available.

Clarity rating: 5

I had no concerns with the clarity of the text I read.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is internally consistent in terms of terminology and framework.

Modularity rating: 4

There are alignment issues with some of the equations extending way outside of the text margins. Looks like LaTeX might have been used to create the pdf file for the book. Perhaps the margins could be widened a bit so that more text would appear per line within the PDF viewer.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

Yes, although I think the Matrix Algebra chapters could be more supplemental or even in an Appendix.

Interface rating: 5

Figures seem fine - just the margin issues I alluded to before.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The text contains no grammatical errors from my reading.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

No problem whatsoever with cultural insensitivity.

Comments

I appreciate the creation of this book for material that is still very needed for computer science curricula.