Graph theory is a highly applicable subject in mathematics, from electrical engineering to logistics to chemistry to network engineering, its development has opened up new perspectives on complex problems. Gary Chartrand is one of the most influential voices in graph theory after Harary and Kirchoff. His First Course in Graph Theory provides a fantastic, intuitive introduction to graph theory that sacrifices little rigor. It's well motivated with plenty of examples and explorations across dozens of different fields, from radio tower placement to decision-making via tournaments. I would say it covers most major basic topics in graph theory, requiring very little previous mathematical background. That said, I would have liked to see more linear algebra and ties to graph theory using the adjacency and other matrix representations, which woefully only merited a tiny section of the text. The author includes quite a bit of historical and biographical information on many of the mathematicians behind the theorems, "humanizing" the mathematics a bit and reminding the reader that these theorems were developed by real people with real lives. It made the book very readable, though it felt like material was omitted to make room for these stories.There is very little to no focus on algorithms on graphs, though Prim's algorithm is mentioned briefly. Operations on graphs is also not touched except for the few very basics, like joins. All in all, I would highly recommend anyone with an interest in graph theory to begin with this book.