Essence of Discrete Mathematics

The Prentice Hall "Essence of Computing" series provides a concise, practical and uniform introduction to the core components of an undergraduate computer science degree. Acknowledging recent changes within Higher Education, this approach uses a variety of pedagogical tools - case studies, worked examples and self-test questions - to underpin the students' learning. This book covers the essential topics of a first course on discrete mathematics. Following an introductory chapter, which explains to the reader how to use the book, there follows chapters on sets and logic. In these chapters every effort has been made to give the reader clear instructions on how to calculate values for mathematical expressions for small finite sets. Since it is best to use examples familiar to the reader, sets of numbers are used extensively. Nevertheless, it is important for the reader to examine non-numerical examples, and so a case study is introduced at the end of the chapter on sets and then subsequently used throughout the remainder of the book. Once these basic skills have been mastered, the reader progresses on to relations and functions.