Product Description

This book provides a unified, insightful, and modern treatment of linear optimization, that is, linear programming, network flow problems, and discrete optimization. It includes classical topics as well as the state of the art, in both theory and practice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29188 in Books
• Published on: 1997-02-01
• Released on: 1997-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

Review
"The true merit of this book, however, lies in its pedagogical qualities which are so impressive..." "Throughout the book, the authors make serious efforts to give geometric and intuitive explanations of various algebraic concepts, and they are widely successful in this effort." "In conclusion, this is an outstanding textbook that presents linear optimization in a truly modern and up-to-date light. One reading of this book is sufficient to appreciate the tremendous amount of quality effort that the authors have put into the writing, and I strongly recommend it to all teachers, researchers and practitioners of mathematical programming." --Motakuri Ramana in Optima, Issue 54

About the Author
The authors are Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Customer Reviews

Par Excellence!
This book is THE best LP book I have come across. The topics are very clear and presented in the best possible manner. Introduces you to several basic and advanced LP topics, theorems and algorithms. The exercises at the end of each chapter test the students' understanding in an appropriate manner. A good number of examples are given to explain the theory in a better way. I would definitely recommend this book to a student interested in learning about optimization procedures and/or algorithm development.

Surely helps if you have taken a linear algebra course before. Some students who haven't had a linear algebra course find the math nomenclature formidable in the beginning.

Quite good
This book is impressive for theory, every thing you ever wanted to know or how to avoid some other is here. I teach to industrial engineering students, so i have to use other books for the application, but for the theory, everything is covered here, even more, in the book are several simple rules to avoid tipical problems of the simplex method or transportation problems, or integer forms. You can't call yourself a pro if you haven't read this book.

Nice intuition and good coverage
The best part of this book is the first half, where the foundations of linear programming are presented in a clear yet relatively rigorous fashion, accompanied by numerous intuitive geometrical explanations of the abstract general concepts. This approach, supplementing mathematics with graphical insights, works extremely well for this topic.

The quality goes down somewhat, perhaps neccessarily, in the latter half of the book as topics are presented less carefully, and in a somewhat rushed manner in order to cover all of the material the authors decided to include. Given that the fundamentals are covered so well, perhaps this is a fair trade.

The only real negative I can think of is that it's a small crime for professors to create their own publishing companies (Athena only publishes works by a small group of MIT professors) and then still charge outrageous amounts for the books. This would be completely unacceptable were it not for the fact that, unlike most self-published work, this book's production quality is on par with that of the large publishers.