Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science

ISBN:0716743582
Pages:800
Date:2002-07-19
Publisher:W. H. Freeman
Rating:3.0

Read Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science Online
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    Product Description
The new edition of Mathematical Structures for Computer Science continues to offer a pedagogically rich and intuitive introduction to discrete mathematics structures. It meets the needs of computer science majors by being both comprehensive and accessible. Relevant applications are balanced alongside clear presentation of concepts to help students better understand this text, which has been popular amongst professors and their classes for almost twenty-five years./p>
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
A good reference
I used this book in my Data Structures class. It has sample problems with solutions in the back of the book so you understand what they were talking about (unfortunately, I cannot say the same for a lot of data structures texts) The sample problems were also good for review for an exam. This was one of the few Computer Science textbooks that I have actually kept as a reference.
CS Professors Love This Book. CS Students Hate It.
If you are seasoned in the ways of computer science and mathematics, you will probably love this book. However if you are new to the concepts presented in the pages of this book, you will probably hate it. It is particularly bad once you really start getting into the meat of things, around chapter three. The examples and explanations are utterly terse. Here is how the book defines "cardinality": "...The number of elements in a finite set is the cardinality of the set, so this would be a set of cardinality k." That is the best explanation the book offers as to the meaning of the word cardinality, a word my professor used close to fifty times every lecture, a word that really deserves better explanation than a single sentence, especially with regard to sets. If I were providing something constructive the author, I would probably say that definitions should be much easier to find and much more detailed and examples of definitions should cover all the angles. I suppose my largest complaint with the book would simply be that if you are a CS student and you REALLY NEED a strong foundation in the concepts of discrete math, this book doesn't quite get there. The book misses its target audience.