Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods: Applications to Physical Systems (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was my first comp. physics book and it was easy and
very instructive. I can assure your money is well spent.
If you find this book too easy, then you should move on to
Thijssen's Computational Physics which is intended for the
`graduate' level readers.
Only 4 stars (not 5) because I don't think that the codes
provided in the book are that useful. Everyone has different
coding style. What really matters is the physical concepts and
not the numerical receipes.

Good introductory book on Computational Physics.
Projects proposed cover different difficulties so it can be used for college students at all levels.Concepts are well explainded. Introduces areas including linear and nonlinear systems, normal modes and waves, and electrodynamics. This second edition offers expanded material on chaos, complexity, and quantum mechanics, programs with more use of graphics, and appendices on Fortran and C.

Excellent, outstanding book for clarity, elegance, writing style and level of detail. This book won't leave you alone on the intricacies of marrying physics and computer programming and will make your programming activity more intereesting if you are more of a programmer and you physical studies more rewarding and less
"pen-and-paperlike" if you are an aspiring physicist. In fact I highly recommend this book to anyone that has an interest in how nature works and in playing with computers. The extreme clarity of this book makes it accessible to junior colege students and even to advanced, motivated high school students or for self study. I would have preferred to see the example code in the book
in C or better C++ but using BASIC has the advantage of making the book more esy to read and is just sligtly annoying for the
C++ or Java programmer. ( Are there any other kind of real programmers? ;) Just make sure you master your language enough to make calculations, use functions, and are able to produce at least some basic graphics (using C++ and openGL or DirectX would rock). Judge by yourself, but I would buy without a thought a book whose first chapter is on the "Coffe Cooling Problem".

The book is good and easy enough to understand although I wish it had the BASIC codes of previous editions. However I bought this book "new" from Amazon, it came in plastic, and after a month its already falling apart. Almost immediately after getting it the spine started to break and pages are falling out. Unfortunately I can't even return the book right now because I need it. Buy this somewhere else.