It might make book more interesting to the reader and arresting of his attention if more exotic examples from different lands and cultures were included. I will say that I found nothing culturally insensitive or offensive in any way in the text. If we accept the proposition that a book on discrete math needs be inclusive of a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds, the book may fall short on that count. I find the author's mechanics very good and his style is a joyful and as stated above enthusiastic. It is truly an excellent interface built with a busy student in mind. You can click on certain problems and the solutions are given. You can click through to anywhere you want to in the book. Also, the online version of the book is fantastic. There are different typefaces and fonts which alert the reader to what is going on. I think the writing is superlative and very clear and totally logical. It seems well organized the way that it is. I'm not sure how the book could be reorganized nor do I see anything to be gained from reorganizing. This seems like it might be a long pull for a student. I notice that section 3.1 which deals with "Propositional Logic" goes from page 199 through page 213. It is possible that the pieces of text could be a little more bite-sized. From what I know of the subjects involved, the terminology seems appropriate and consistent I found it very engaging and not at all boring. It has a joyful, upbeat, and enthusiastic voice. I found the text to be extremely well written. These topics are all timeless so I can't imagine this content ever becoming obsolete. I didn't find any errors so I would imagine the book is highly accurate. It's in its third edition and the author mentions making corrections and thanking others for pointing out errors. It appears to have a comprehensive index and it also has a "list of symbols" which I would imagine would be very helpful. I have not taken discrete mathematics so I am not sure what all the areas are but it's over 400 pages long and seems to cover in good depth the topics that it covers. Reviewed by John Salisbury, Adjunct Instructor, Rogue Community College on 8/25/20 Overall, I am glad that I came across this book. I am looking forward to use it in my regular discrete math course meant for math majors. When I used this book in my computational discrete math course, I had to supplement it with several handouts. The book is geared more towards math majors than non majors. It is a math book! Math books are neutral to all cultures! The figures drawn to illustrate graphs etc., are appropriate. One can easily move from one part of the book to another.
This is the part I very much like in the book. When I introduced equivalence relations to my students, I had to explain the congruence relations (to provide a good example) before we covered the number theory chapter. However, I would prefer the number theory chapter to appear earlier in the book so that the number theory concepts and examples can be used throughout the book.
However, please note my comment on organization. Since discrete math is composed of several independent topics, usually there is not much of an issue with the arrangement of the topics. I like the part where you can just click on the problem to go to the solution and vice versa. The author has provided solutions to several problems in the exercises. The examples provided are very relevant to the topics covered. The topics covered in this book have book have been in existence for a long time and I cannot imagine them to become isolate ever. A very well edited bookÄiscrete Math has applications in many areas including computer science, economics, etc. It is preparing the students to take more proof intensive courses such as Linear Algebra. This really helps the students to understand the material well. He goes through the proofs in much more details than most of the other books on this topic. However, the approach taken by this author is excellent. Many students find them to be hard to comprehend. Discrete Math is usually the first course where the students come across theorems and proofs. My students also liked the fact that they did not have to pay any money to use the book. I used this book for my course on "Computational Discrete Mathematics". It provides a good motivation for the topic that is going to be covered. The "investigate" part for each concept is an excellent approach. These are the topics normally covered in any typical discrete math course. This book covers all the important topics such as set theory, logic, counting techniques, number theory, graph theory etc. Reviewed by Nachimuthu Manickam, Professor, DePauw University on 12/18/20