Fundamentals of Queueing Theory

For students and researchers, the 2008 Fourth edition of Fundamentals of Queueing Theory by Gross, Shortle, Thompson and Harris is an excellent book. The material can be difficult so the precision of presentation is really helpful. It's nice to see the dedication to the late Carl Harris. He did so much work for the queueing community and Operations Research in general. The third edition had 439 pages and the new edition has 500. The chapter titles look the same but the old chapter on Bounds Approximations, Numerical Techniques and Simulation has been split in two. The new appendices on Laplace Transforms, and difference equations will likely make the book more friendly to students. There are lots of new problems in the problem section. The humor in the problems and examples of this book (e.g. "Fly-ByNite Airlines has a telephone exchange " or "Cary Meback, the president of a large Virginia supermarket") make them fun. The addition of retrial queues and level crossing sections are certainly welcome. Throughout the book, the writing style has improved from the previous edition to make the book more reader friendly. I'm convinced that the authors have succeeded in this. This book makes an excellent text (for graduate students and advanced undergraduates) and an excellent research reference. This book is thorough and up-to-date, and I highly recommend it.

I always recommend Kleinrock's "Queueing systems Volume I: Theory" to my friends for learning the basics of queueing theory. But "Fundamentals of queueing theory" is an excellent text to have. I find it much easier to find the necessary pages to refresh my memory on an equation or a specific approach to solving a problem when using Gross and Harris.

I used this book to supplement a course in queuing theory and found it to be more readable than other books on the topic, including ELEMENTS OF QUEUING THEORY WITH APPLICATIONS. This may not be a book to pick up for casual reading to learn about queuing theory, but if you are taking a queuing-theory course, I would highly recommend it. I struggled with deciding to give this book four or five stars: Four stars because I feel that the derivations of various queuing models could have been presented in a clearer manner. Five stars because I think it's the most readable queuing-theory book I have encountered.

Fundamentals of Queueing Theory (third edition) by D. Gross and C. Harris is THE classic queueing text book. It is up-to-date, thorough, rigorous, intuitive, and even fun to read (for the mathematically inclined). This book can be read at different levels, none of them easy. It is intended for an audience of graduate students in operations research, industrial engineering, management science, or mathematics. There are other excellent queueing books out there, but this has to be the overall best seller! Highly recommended.