Combinatorics, a subject dealing with ways of arranging and distributing objects, involves ideas from geometry, algebra, and analysis. The breadth of the theory is matched by that of its applications, which include topics as diverse as codes, circuit design and algorithm complexity. It has thus become an essential tool in many scientific fields. In this second edition the authors have made the text as comprehensive as possible, dealing in a unified manner with such topics as graph theory, extremal problems, designs, colorings, and codes. The depth and breadth of the coverage make the book a...

This book stresses the connection between, and the applications of, design theory to graphs and codes. Beginning with a brief introduction to design theory and the necessary background, the book also provides relevant topics for discussion from the theory of graphs and codes.

This book stresses the connection between, and the applications of, design theory to graphs and codes. Beginning with a brief introduction to design theory and the necessary background, the book also provides relevant topics for discussion from the theory of graphs and codes.

It is gratifying that this textbook is still sufficiently popular to warrant a third edition. I have used the opportunity to improve and enlarge the book. When the second edition was prepared, only two pages on algebraic geometry codes were added. These have now been removed and replaced by a relatively long chapter on this subject. Although it is still only an introduction, the chapter requires more mathematical background of the reader than the remainder of this book. One of the very interesting recent developments concerns binary codes defined by using codes over the alphabet 7l.4- There...