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An Introduction to Optimization, 2nd Edition Review by Marc J. Driftmeyer
Excellent and concise work on Engineering Linear Programming
This is to all the yahoos bemoaning this work as being terrible.
It's an Engineering class on Linear Programming and Optimization. It's not an Operations Research class on Optimization with Linear Programming and the Simplex Method for Business majors or other Non-Applied Sciences.
Do some research before you take a course with a textbook written and/or taught by a Professor of Electrical Engineering or other engineering discipline.
Having taken this course as an elective during my Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science bachelor degrees I watched my Calculus Professor forcibly pausing and having to stop and restate constantly the work he was trying to teach because it was a Business heavy class.
Off topic:
Washington State University really needs to split the course into two courses and let a grad student teach the basic class for Business Majors and leave the quantitative class for non-business majors who understand Vectors, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Multi-Variable Calculus.
Personal Experience:
I personally had a class in Tensor Calculus with a demoted Electrical Engineering Professor who had to move to the Pure and Applied Mathematics department and he could never shut up about how wronged he was but always ignored his past and lack of research that cost him his post.
He was an atrocious professor and his choice in material was garbage. When I asked him to work out his Manifold partial derivatives derivations [how he went from A to Z] he sat for five to ten minutes staring at the board while the 25 students waited. He later turned and told me, ``If you don't understand how to do the derivation then you should not be in this class.''
Did I whine about it on a board about how terrible the course was? No. I told the man I'm paying him to be the professor and prove how he arrived at that result. I then said, if you can't manage that then you are of no use to anyone in this class.
I dropped the class along with about half the other students and he hasn't taught the class since. Retaking Tensor Calculus turned out to be proof that the man was an overbearing braggart who was over his head in teaching this material. When it was taught by a competent person it was like a light bulb going on.
There are excellent works and there are non-excellent works, and then there are nightmares of professors. It's up to the student to determine if it's worth their time to suffer or to cut ties and find a different class with the right combination.
If you don't you'll regret that approach to your university days.
IF YOUR BACKGROUND IS LIGHT IN APPLIED CALCULUS, LINEAR ALGEBRA AND MORE THEN THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU.
It is an excellent book for it's target audience.
Operations Research: An Introduction (8th Edition) by Hamdy A. Taha
http://www.amazon.com/Operations-Research-Introduction-Hamdy-Taha/dp/0131889230/ref=pd_sim_b_5
is an excellent work for one's non-analytically heavy professional life where business and financial analysis is the focus first.
Personally, I learn from both.