Schaum's Outline of Discrete Mathematics

by Seymour Lipschutz

Tough Test Questions? Missed Lectures? Not Enough Time? Fortunately for you, there's Schaum's Outlines. More than 40 million students have trusted Schaum's to help them succeed in the classroom and on exams. Schaum's is the key to faster learning and higher grades in every subject. Each Outline presents all the essential course information in an easy-to-follow, topic-by-topic format. You also get hundreds of examples, solved problems, and practice exercises to test your skills. This Schaum's Outline gives you:

Genres: Mathematics, Textbooks, Reference, Logic, Nonfiction, Technical

504 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 2009

Reviews

[Matthias · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to Goodreads I've been plodding through this book since April 2017. According to Anki I've got over a thousand cards in my "src:lipschutz" tag. I didn't learn/memorize literally everything in the book - I'm just not smart enough for a lot of it, or maybe I'm too lazy - and I'm sure in many places my understanding is a bit shallow. (There are certainly theorems I've memorized but wouldn't be able to prove, for instance.) Regardless, I regard this as a significant personal accomplishment. It overcomes the calculus II I failed twelve years ago, such that I no longer think of myself as "not a math person." Moreover, not only do I think of myself different, I think of math quite differently. Math, as I now understand it, is just those set of things simple enough to be contained in their own definitions, but complex enough to surprise us. Since we (or at least I) are quite stupid, these can be quite simple indeed. I want to keep learning more math for the rest of my life, much like I want to keep learning more history.

Thus I think this more than meets my criterion for 5-star books (changes my fundamental view of the world,) though perhaps, looking at the effort I've thrown at this thing, someone might attribute to Stockholm Syndrome instead.

[Ben Rosenthal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Traumatic book

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schaum's Outlines are a godsend, not (just) for the lazy and incompetent students they claim as their target audience, but also for students at worthless colleges with nearly non-existent math curricula, and basically anyone looking to close some gaps in their education. Discrete Mathematics in particular should be required reading to everyone pretending to be a programmer.
It assumes next to no background and is quite thorough in its treatment of the subjects, so at times it can get a bit tedious, but it's worth sitting through even those parts, just to make sure you don't have any blind spots in your knowledge. Everyone will have covered at least some of the material at some point (we covered the entire chapter on set theory in elementary school (hurray for the New Math), and nearly all of the probability chapter and the vectors and matrices appendix in middle and high school; and even my college can't get away with not covering at least some of the chapter on boolean algebra), but the scope of the book is ambitious enough that you'll run into uncharted territory sooner or later.

Note that while I recommend this for programmers, the authors are clearly mathematicians, and at times you get the impression that they aren't very fond of the mathematical sloppiness programmers are known for, and enjoy going out of their way to annoy them.
Being very specific about the definition of regular expressions is fair enough, given how they're only barely related to what programmers call regular expressions nowadays; insisting that binary trees are emphatically not a special case of rooted trees is getting quite close to nit-picking, even if it's technically true; going nine sections of a twelve-section chapter on boolean algebra without even hinting at logic gates, all the while insisting on calling the operations addition and multiplication rather than or and and, and even discussing boolean algebras as lattices before touching on truth tables, though, that's just spitefulness.
And while some chapters (the ones on graph theory in particular) do specifically discuss computer algorithms, their pseudo-code is that ridiculous brand of COBOL-inspired eye-rape True Mathematicians are so fond of. You'd think a mathematician, of all people, would understand the value of good abstractions. However, none of those algorithms are so long or unfamiliar that this is problematic.

My main complaints about the book aren't this or the lack of material (it's impressively broad as well as deep; even if the "review of cryptology" the cover promises is entirely absent), but rather two aspects that are presumably inevitable in low-cost series like this.
First, the typos. The first half is reasonably clear of them, but then they gradually increase in intensity and peak somewhere around page 300 before settling down again. I know low-cost and highly specialised means you can't afford thorough editing, but this is the third edition of a book on a subject matter that's very unforgiving with regards to misprints; it shouldn't be this bad. An attentive reader will usually catch them before they do any harm, but it's still annoying.
Secondly, the quality of the paper and the bindings. It's physically impossible to read this book more than maybe three times. By the time I got to the final chapters on my first read-through, the paper was already disintegrating. Granted, you can buy it four or five times and still come out ahead, financially, of the equivalent material in standard textbooks, but it's something to be aware of.

In the end, though, definitely worth the money and the time to read it. It could have been made better with the help of a proofreader or three, but I'm still going to get some of the other books in this series.

[- Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

ملخصات شيوم واحدة من المراجع العلمية المفيدة المساعدة للدارس في المنهجيات الجامعية. يستعرض هذا الكتاب المفاهيم الرئيسية بترتيب منطقي ثم يلحقها بأمثلة محلولة ثم تمارين للحل.. جيد وأنصح به

[Sabrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a very good way to highlight ideas in discrete mathematics, it gives the readers many detailed examples to build up knowledge from!
it's amazing for it's examples.

[Anand Jadon]

this book wonderful

[Solomaya Schwab · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book for reference and self-study alike. Concise enough to be portable but still covers enough topics to be useful.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most typos I have ever seen in a published book, and this is the 3rd edition. My running tally broke 30