Discrete Mathematics and its Applications

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Summary: very good book for CS majors
Review: This is a serios book for CS majors; concept are well defined and there are good examples. Best of all it has plenty of excersises after each chapter; I found it a great textbook for studying.

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Summary: The most popular and successful discrete math text
Review: Once you see this book it should be no surprise why it is used at over 400 schools worldwide. Students and instructors have consistently given it enthusiastic reviewers. Besides the text itself you might want to pick up the Student Solutions Guide which provides worked solutions to all odd-numbered exercises. Check out the accompanying Web site...; you'll find a lot of useful information there.

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Summary: TRUST ME! very good textbook, no mysteries here.
Review: This is a very good textbook. Good explanations. Clear, yet challenging. For serious CS people. Otherwise, don't bother. Leaves reader with clear understanding of the subject. More than ample examples and problems. Even semi-satisfactory studying arms reader with an advantage when it comes to exam content because the book problems resemble those of test problems. Solutions manual is a must.

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Summary: The best book in the field
Review: I have used all four editions of Rosen's book with much success with mathematics and computer science students in discrete mathematics courses for over ten years. Discrete mathematics should not be approached as a cookbook subject, and Rosen does not take a cookbook approach to the material in his book. Students are not spoonfed; they need to work carefully through the text. Rosen is very successful in helping students learn to think mathematically. Students who are serious about their study of discrete mathematics and computing will profit greatly from working through many of the more than 650 well-chosen examples and applications, ranging from easy to difficult. The new fourth edition has added many new applications, including system specifications, Web searching, and the reve's puzzle. The exercises (over 3000) are unequaled in any other discrete mathematics textbook --- they range from elementary and routine to very challenging. Answers to odd-numbered problems are in the back of the book. The new accompanying Web site includes over 250 additional exercises with answers; its many features are certainly worth exploring. A very student-friendly Student Solutions Guide provides detailed solutions to the odd-numbered exercises with much additional information on the material and how to approach it. Especially noteworthy is a companion paperback, "Applications of Discrete Mathematics" (McGraw-Hill, 1991) edited by J. Michaels and K. Rosen, consisting of 24 chapters, each devoted to an interesting application of discrete mathematics and well-suited to either classroom coverage or individual reading; some examples are bin packing, coding theory, Catalan numbers, legislative apportionment, network survivability, graph multicoloring.

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Summary: The best math text I've ever used!
Review: I'm taking a course in discrete math at Monmouth University. I was really worried about the course, but this textbook helps make discrete interesting and understandable. The author motivates the subject with so many relevant applications that he's made me understand why the subject is important for computer science. The biographies are great too. I've also checked out the Web site and it's awesome. When I've had trouble with exercises, I've found the Student Solutions Guide to be really, really helpful. This is just about the only math textbook that I ever could read and understand.

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Summary: A must-read for students of Computer Science theory
Review: This textbook is an excellent overview of computer-science related mathematics. I don't know what I would have done in recent coursework without this resource. Kudos to Kenneth H. Rosen.

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Summary: Required reading in Berkeley computer science
Review: I used this book in a discrete mathematics course at Berkeley. The book made me really excited about the variety of topics in CS, touching on such diverse subjects as RSA, the Chinese Remainder Theorem, and networks and graphs. Fascinating problems throughout. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

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Summary: The Elusive Computing Rabbit just ...
Review: Discrete Mathematics is a conceptually taxing but often mechanically trivial subject. Comprehension of this subject is clearly essential for the good software engineer. Mr. Rosen exhibits a special skill in letting the unsuspecting student immediately fall down the old pedagogical rabbit hole where, like Alice in Wonderland, we're bewildered by cerebral cul-de-sacs, awash in incontrovertible inconsistencies, served a panoply of unsolveable puzzles, with a peppering of paradoxes for good measure. This all may be engaging for mathematical sycophants of the Red Queen with boku time on their hands but makes for restless sleep for the rest of us.

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Summary: Not a very student friendly book
Review: I have read this book at most a dozen times. Still it is hard to understand most of the examples that are presented in this book. The explanations are short and superficial. This is defenitly not a good book for students. It is more like a brush-up of concepts for a math major which has mastered Discrete Mathematics. This Book is defenitely by far NOT for the Average student.

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Summary: Interesting Examples in Mathematical Samples
Review: Mathematics, discrete or indiscreet (for those flashy integrals), tends to be a dry subject, unless one is provided with interesting applications with which to utilize the methods being learned. Rosen's book does just this, exemplifying the uses of number theory in working with RSA Encryption, of counting methods and combinatorics in calculating the probabilities of poker hands and lotteries (and more serious subjects), and applications of graph theory to the design of multiprocessor system buses. With an extensive set of exercises, this book makes for an excellent textbook (and is used as such) for the computer science student at the university, or at heart.