Customer Reviews

The Joy of Mathematica, Second Edition: Instant Mathematica for Calculus, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra

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"The Joy of Mathematica" really does make Mathematica software a "Joy" to use, and to learn. Users of Mathematica know and love the powerful capabilities of this excellent mathematical software environment for symbolic and numeric computation with incredible support for 2D and 3D graphics. Students and professionals considering adopting Mathematica are often awestruck by the enormous range of mathematical capabilities suddenly put at their fingertips. However, Mathematica is not a Joy to use, as each powerful command (and there are many) is accompanied by so many parameters and modifiers (all necessary), requiring a not so Joyful syntax. "The Joy of Mathematica" comes to the rescue, and indeed, it is a real JOY to use! "Joy" comes in the form of a book, an easy to use tutorial and guide, with an accompanying CD. The software on the CD installs easily, and modifies your own Mathematica "front end" environment by providing very useful and well organized pull-down menus which launch diaglog boxes. The diaglog boxes are great! They remind the user which parameters and choices need to be specified in the context of a particular Mathematica command. They provide immediate examples for the student to try. They output clear summaries of the entered requests, organize the computed output, and allow the user to view the actual Mathematica commands which "Joy" issues. This in turn helps the user learn Mathematica's arcane command syntax (if you want to bother). "Joy" provides the student and experienced user with the menu structure we all wish we had when using Mathematica. "Joy" is really a terrific teaching and learning tool for college students of science and engineering, and a great way to bring great math software into the hands of high school students. It's a "Joy" for me and my son, and it will work for you too.

Joy does work on Mathematica 5.1, however, the current version, and it runs on both Mac and PC platforms (OS X for the Mac and Windows XP for the PC).

Joy is a wonderful compilation of program-based notebooks that shorten the time-to-use Mathematica dramatically, for both novice and computer-savvy students and learners. The manual is well-written, visually attractive, and uncluttered.

Joy of Mathematica makes it far easier to graph (2- and 3-D, parametric, polar coordinates, and more), manipulate expressions (simplify, solve), differentiate and integrate functions, work with series and sequences, vector fields, matrices, multiple variables, and so forth.

Writing adjuncts to Mathematica is something of a cottage industry, and several other Mathematica-based programs can help: Calculus Wiz (for high school and college students), Explorer, and Navigator, for instance.

Wolfram Research (publisher of Mathematica) wants to penetrate the secondary-level educational market and is offering very attractive site licenses to schools and individual licenses to students at those schools. It is not clear whether the publishers of Joy will offer a similar site license and individual student purchase rate.

Finally, it is not known at this point whether the authors will re-optimize Joy for Mathematica 5.1 version.

A wonderful book! Maple has been described as "the force" in CAS with Mathematica described as "the dark force". This wonderful book brings Mathematica into the light.