MathLink ®: Network Programming with MATHEMATICA ® [Paperback]

Chikara Miyaji (Editor), Paul Abbott (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521645980 | ISBN-13: 978-0521645980 | Publication Date: July 30, 2001

This book introduces the basic concepts of MathLink and explains how to extend Mathematica using MathLink. Miyaji and Abbott show how to write Mathlink programs and how to apply Mathlink in a variety of situations. MathLink comprises a simple and powerful way to write programs that communicate with Mathematica and offers access to a wide range of network resources. Writing network programs is the most demanded skill in the Internet Age and MathLink provides a sophisticated level of network programming to the nonprogrammer, scientist, engineer, and student. Mathematica's powerful "problem-oriented" programming language includes symbolic and numerical computation, and excellent graphics capabilities, which enables users to write compact and elegant programs that are much shorter than in conventional languages. Within MathLink one can write programs that communicate with Mathematica. Since most electronic devices are connected to, or controlled by, a computer, it is straightforward to interface them to Mathematica. Once your device is connected to Mathematica, you can manipulate the data within Mathematica. The authors examine in detail source code for a range of practical examples ranging from elementary to advanced, allowing readers to easily adapt the code to suit their own practical needs. The text assumes that the reader is already familiar with Mathematica.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This how-to book shows ways to use MathLink as a communication layer on top of Mathematica. The Programming style is object oriented...topics treated include building turtle graphics and cellular automata, creating event-driven mechanisms, interacting with graphical/geometric objects, and communicating between Mathematica sessions...The accompanying CD-ROM has the MathLink programs..." Choice

Book Description

This book introduces the basic concepts of MathLink and explains how to extend Mathematica using MathLink. MathLink provides a simple and powerful way to write programs which communicate with Mathematica and it provides access to a wide range of network resources. Writing network programs is the most demanded skill in the Internet age and MathLink provides a sophisticated level of network programming to the non-programmer, scientists, engineer, and student.Source code for a range of practical examples ranging from elementary to advanced is examined in detail, allowing the reader easily to adapt the code to suit their own practical needs. The purpose of this book is to show how to write MathLink programs and how to apply MathLink in a variety of situations.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (July 30, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521645980
• ISBN-13: 978-0521645980
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,109,809 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction, May 6, 2002

By 

Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: MathLink ®: Network Programming with MATHEMATICA ® (Paperback)

For those who know Mathematica well, and who also want
to call Mathematica programs either remotely or from
programs not written in Mathematica, this book is the
canonical reference; in fact the only one that I am
aware of other than the documentation that comes with
Mathematica. The material in tbe book goes far beyond
what can be found in the documentation however. As the
authors observe, writing programs from scratch using
the TCP/IP protocol can be formidable, and so MathLink
was invented to ease the process for those who do not
want to become expert in TCP/IP. Readers will also
have to have a working knowledge of the C programming
language.

The book covers the Windows. Macintosh, and
Unix platforms, with LINUX emphasized for the latter.
Since all three of these operating systems are covered
in the book, this makes navigation in it a little
annoying at times. It does expand on the actual
evaluation process when executing a Mathlink program,

and how Mathlink does type conversion. Latency issues
in the network will of course have to be dealt with in
using Mathlink. The authors devote a chapter of the
book in dealing with data transfer times across a
network. They are also wise enough to know that the
data transfer is best done with functions written in C
for situations that are time-intensive. Readers just
need to remember to call the Install function after
each change they make to the .c and .tm files, as this

fact is not emphasized by the authors.
A chapter is devoted to the debugging of
programs written in MathLink. The ability to debug
these programs is really because of the underlying C
code rather than Mathematica, for the latter does not
of course have a debugger. The authors also illustrate
real-time graphics with TurtleGraphics, which is based
on the graphics primitives of Logo. Although somewhat
antiquated, it was put in to allow simulations of
cellular automata that are done in the next chapter.
Transfer times in the performing of real-time graphics
are reduced by employing color tables. For those
working on MAC OS or Windows machines, a discussion of
the digitizing of movies is given using the QuickTime
movie player. These discussions of real-time graphics
are generalized to interactive graphics in the next
chapter. This discussion is particularly enlightening,
since it deals with how to implement object-oriented
programming in Mathematica. Interestingly, objects are
thought of as function names when sending messages to
them. This is an illustration of the classic "message-
passing" paradigm in object-oriented programming, with
the messages being send to objects as their function
arguments. The authors discuss the class method and
instance method; the latter being the collection of
definitions that make up the class. Single and
multiple inheritance, a very important feature of
object-oriented programming, are discussed, and the
authors show how to create an event-driven mechanism
using Mathlink. Most interestingly, they show how to
create a window object, and this leads to a detailed
discussion on how to write a real-time interactive
graphics system. The latter is not supported by the
Mathematica front-end, and so for readers interested
in creating these for purposes such as curve-fitting
to data, their discussion is very helpful.

In addition, for those involved in large-scale

team efforts in writing Mathematica applications, or
programs calling Mathematica, the authors show how to
use Mathlink to communicate between different
Mathematica sessions. They discuss briefly the use of
J/Link to enable users to write Java programs to call
Mathematica programs, thus exploiting Java's
portability capabilities.