26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
From a Functional Programmer Who Hates Mathematics, May 21, 2008
This review is from: Mastering Technical Mathematics, Third Edition (Paperback)
I'm a professional programmer. I didn't go to college. I didn't even graduate high school. I've been writing code professionally for a long time now and I get well paid for it. Recently, I interviewed for a job and I nailed it. But, I didn't get the job. Why? Not because I failed the coding tests or that I wasn't a good match for the team. It wasn't even because I lacked a degree. It was because I lacked the common foundation of knowledge that high school graduates and CS majors have. Although I had never had a problem with it before, I've reached a point in my career where I'm qualified for jobs that expect more than just a good resume and solid interviewing skills. I faltered when it came to some mathematics and my algorithms were elementary at best. Being able to write code was no longer enough. I needed to go back and recapture a CS background using the same method I have used to teach myself everything else: books.
The first thing I discovered is that it is nearly impossible to find a book on algorithms that doesn't already assume you have a full high school mathematics education. The second thing I discovered is that it is nearly impossible to find a book on mathematics that covers it all, from the ground up. I searched and searched Amazon and, oddly enough, this book never came up. I just happened to be wandering through a local book store and saw it on the shelf. I bought it on impulse and I am glad that I did.
This book is precisely what someone like me needs. It starts off at astonishingly basic levels (what? really? I need a book to tell me how addition works?) and then moves quickly up through the complexities of increasingly advanced mathematics. The writing style is conversational which is good but it can also be bad. Coming from an English and linguistics background, I can't help but cringe when I see unnecessary exclamation points in text and this book has its fair share. That isn't so much a negative toward the book as it is just a biased observation.
Mastering Technical Mathematics covers a lot of ground in a short period of time and the author wastes as little page space as possible. Sometimes this is good; sometimes this is bad. Often, the explanations are numbingly terse or convoluted. A few re-reads of a paragraph helps the meaning crystallize but, in an apparent effort to keep the page count down, the author sacrificed for brevity sections that might have been better aided by a little more depth. Again, this isn't necessarily a negative toward the book. It just means you might have to work a little harder from time-to-time for full comprehension. Nothing wrong with that.
The reason why I am not giving this book five stars is partially because of the sometimes confusing explanations but mainly because of the charts and graphs which are, for the most part, poorly rendered and, worse, often completely inexplicable. This wouldn't be a huge deal except that nearly every page contains some kind of figure or illustration. This is good because it breaks up the text, keeps the whole affair feeling breezy. This book definitely does not feel like some weighty tome on the World's Most Boring Subject and all of those graphs and charts are partially to blame for the levity. I'm glad that they're there; I just wish that they were more clear. Then again, maybe it's just me.
The biggest accolade I can give this book, other than that it's clear the author really enjoyed writing it, is that it, along with a few other books and a newly-purchased HP 50g Graphing Calculator (RPN 4 LIFE!@$) has instilled in me a love of mathematics. I used to hate math. My favorite phrase was that I'm mathematically dyslexic. I'm not. I was just intimidated. This book has helped dismantle that intimidation. Now I'm not just learning all of the mathematics I had missed, I'm loving math. Absolutely love the stuff.
In the long run, this book will be partially responsible for me reaching the next level of my career. I've paired it with Forgotten Algebra (which is an excellent workbook) and, for algorithms, Algorithms in C++. This final book finally gives me a reason to get my hands dirty with C++.
Highly recommended.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Course or Reference Book, February 22, 2010
This review is from: Mastering Technical Mathematics, Third Edition (Paperback)
I have been buying Stan's books for over 15 years, on many different technical subjects. I have never been disappointed! His books are always a great buy for the present and future reference!
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