Combinatorics: A Guided Tour (MAA Textbooks)
This is a well-written, reader-friendly, and self-contained undergraduate course on combinatorics, focusing on enumeration. The book includes plenty of exercises, and about hal of them come with hints. --M. Bona, Choice Magazine...Combinatorics is an excellent candidate for a special topics course for mathematics majors; with the broad spectrum of applications that course can simultaneously be an advanced and a capstone course. This book would be an excellent selection for the textbook of such a course. The explanations are at an appropriate level for the audience and there are exercises at the end of each section...The coverage is also sufficient of breadth; all of the major areas of combinatorics are covered...This book is the best candidate for a textbook in combinatorics that I have encountered. --Charles AshbacherI have reviewed many books on discrete mathematics over the years; some have been quite good...However, the book reviewed here,Combinatorics: A Guided Tourby David R. Mazur (hereafter CAGT) is the best book ever written on undergraduate combinatorial theory--it deserves an award. I like everything about this book, starting with the selection of topics and the organization....The delineation of the topics is first rate--better than I have ever seen in any other book. Their presentation is generally thorough, with much of it in the form of worked problems. The book is very much designed as a textbook; there are plenty of problems at the end of each section. ... CAGT has both good breadth and great presentation; it is in fact a new standard in presentation for combinatorics, essential as a resource for any instructor, including those teaching out of a different text. For the student: If you are just starting to build a library in combinatorics, this should be your first book. --The UMAP Journal