7.1 (through page 164), due on March 4

The only thing I really don't understand is what a symmetric group is. The book introduced it by example right at the end of a paragraph and really didn't go into any other detail about what exactly it means. Otherwise this section pretty much made sense. The idea of a group is a little hard to grasp just because we haven't seen that many examples and the definition seems some what vague since a group is formed with just some operation.