Discrete Structures, Logic, and Computability, Second Edition

This book provides excellent coverage of logic and computability (I haven't really looked at the "Discrete Structures" component yet), but is often unnecessarily verbose in its explanations. It would work well in conjunction with a well-taught class, but not necessarily as good on its own.

This is an excellent book! Easy to read and understand. I am an "A" student, at Portland State University and I think that people who wrote bad reviewes of this book did not read the book (just like they might read every 50th page of any other book). Bill Gates once said that every person is born to be able to understand only up to a certain level of abstraction. Just like some of us are born to be able to lift 500 lbs. and some only 50 lbs. In addition, a person has to have some background to be able to understand more advanced topics. The book is most excellent.

I've taught from this text for 8 years. The excellent students have no problem with it. The average students complain that it is hard to understand. I don't think any text covering these topics could be easier to understand, actually.There are plenty of examples in the text. However, the exercises tend to be significantly more complex than the examples. The answers to many exercises are in the back of the book, which is a great help to students.

Software designs must address trade-offs among factors such as performance, usability, completeness, timeliness, correctness and so on. Judging from the number of bugs people encounter, software engineers seem to be trading away too much of the correctness factor for something else.Hein's text addresses this issue by placing much greater emphasis on ideas from logic and methods of proof than most other books on discrete mathematics, such as the popular text by Rosen. In addition, Hein includes material relating important software concepts to abstract algebra, and he does this without slighting other common topics of discrete mathematics, such as sets, relations, functions, counting, automata, and computability. Software engineers who have learned from Hein's text will have practical tools that they can use to deal with the software correctness factor more effectively.Besides all of these good qualities, the text is well organized, clearly written, and punctuated with deligtfully subtle humor. I plan to use it.