David G. Luenberger has directed much of his career toward teaching "portable concepts" - organizing theory around concepts and actually "porting" the concepts to applications where, in the process, the general concepts are often discovered. The search for fundamentals has explicitly directed his research in the fields of control, optimization, planning, economics, and investments, and in turn, it is the discovery of these fundamentals that have motivated his textbook writing projects.

From the reviews of the third edition: "The aim of this book is to present the central concepts of optimization techniques. ... the material in this new edition is organized into three separate parts. ... this very well-written book is a classic textbook in Optimization. It should be present in the bookcase of each student, researcher, and specialist from the host of disciplines from which practical optimization applications are drawn." (Jean-Jacques Strodiot, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1207, 2011)

• Linear Programming.- Basic Properties of Linear Programs.- The Simplex Method.- Duality.- Interior-Point Methods.- Transportation and Network Flow Problems.- Unconstrained Problems.- Basic Properties of Solutions and Algorithms.- Basic Descent Methods.- Conjugate Direction Methods.- Quasi-Newton Methods.- Constrained Minimization.- Constrained Minimization Conditions.- Primal Methods.- Penalty and Barrier Methods.- Dual and Cutting Plane Methods.- Primal-Dual Methods.