The book does a poor job at laying out the basics for the reader. In the first chapter only 2 pages out of 33 are dedicated to describing the theory, the rest of the chapter consists of word problems. Some of those word problems go beyond the scope of the theory outlined for you, to which I thought was not only unfair but a bit intimidating to the curious math student. Sadly, the majority of this book follows the same routine.



From this layout it was clear that this book wasn't written with the complete novice in mind. The Discrete Math [also a Schaum's outline] book I bought alongside this one happens to cover the same topics and does a much better job at explaining the basics with reasonable problems to practice from.



As I said before, I can't recommend this book to anyone who is looking to break way into Combinatorics.