Customer Reviews

The Mathematica Guidebook: Graphics

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It is unfortunate that two recent Amazon reviewers have found it difficult to understand the programming style in this book. I am a retired mathematician, now an antiquarian bookseller. Over the last 14 months, I have been reading all four books in the GuideBooks set and am preparing detailed written reviews on their content for publication elsewhere. The Graphics volume, like volumes 3 and 4, assumes that the reader has read the first volume, Programming, the full text of which is available with this volume. Indeed, this is explicitly stated in Section 0.1.2 of the Introduction:

"The four volumes of the GuideBooks are basically independent, in the sense that readers familiar with Mathematica programming can read any of the other three volumes. But a solid working knowledge of the main topics discussed in The Mathematica GuideBook to Programming -- symbolic expressions, pure functions, rules and replacements, list manipulations -- is required for the Graphics, Numerics, and Symbolics volumes. ... The whole suite of graphical capabilities and all of the mathematical knowledge in Mathematica are accessed and applied through lists, patterns, rules, and pure functions, the material discussed in the Programming volume."

Mathematica's pure functional notation and nonprocedural programming and symbolic pattern-matching can appear quite cryptic, being difficult to understand without the detailed background provided in the Programming volume. This is not to slight the ability of people who have been programming in Mathematica for many years, for one can write procedural, pure function [nonprocedural], or object-oriented programs in this robust system. Fortunately, the Graphics volume comes with a DVD that includes the complete text of all four volumes in the 5029-page GuideBooks series, including an index and hyperlinks to references and material found in the other volumes. Once one has read the needed chapters of the Programming volume, reading and understanding the programs in this outstanding Graphics volume is quite straightforward.

As an artist, I knew I was going to a raised eyebrow or two when I installed Mathematica on my computer. Math isn't art, the naysayers would chant.
Au contraire! And at last I have the book to prove it! Reading through normal Mathematica manuals gives you the briefest of cursory introductions to what the software can do in terms of graphics. Mr Trott's opus, however, was an answer to a prayer.
In excruciating detail he takes you step by step, teaching you how to develop the graphics that indeed show you that Math is Art! Page after page took my breath away, both at the complexity of the math involved and at the bauty that results.
Thank you!

Imagine thumbing through a technical 1340 page book full of Mathematica graphics codes. If you are a Mathematica user, you would love going over this book. Michael Trott's The Mathematica Guidebook to Graphics is a treasure. He generously shared his labor of love with the ever growing Mathematica user community. Each chapter of the book is flooded with a wealth of references; he has clearly done his homework. The number of reference chapters runs well into the hundreds, some chapters have more than 800. Reviewing the references helps to compliment the unfamiliar concepts. The book also has an accompanying DVD. I personally have not used the DVD; I'd rather rehash the codes manually and try to understand them by trail and error. Essential comments explaining the reasoning behind using the commands for the majority of the codes are embedded in the codes. This book is properly called Guidebook; it is not a text book. Its target audience is a semi-advanced Mathematica user. However, interested beginners may well learn a lot going over the codes. Chapters also end with suggestive practice problems, some challenging, but nonetheless rewarding. Michael is a physicist with profound mathematical knowledge and skills. He has developed his own Mathematica coding style. As we all may agree, Mathematica is the natural glue joining physics and mathematics together; the playground is Mathematica and the players are physics and math. In my view, this book needs to be in every Mathematica-using physicist's personal library. I highly recommend the book, and applaud Michael for his enormous efforts in bringing the extended graphics features of Mathematica to the fore.

Haiduke Sarafian, Ph.D.
John T. and Paige S. Smith Professor of Science
The Pennsylvania State University, University College

tHIS BOOK IS JUST EXCELLENT !! eASY TO USE, A FULL GRAPHIC TEACHING BOOK FOR BEGINNERS AND ADVANCED USERS. a MUST HAVE IF YOU'RE USING MATHEMATICA.

I use Mathematica for both professional engineering applications and for personal interests which presently focus on complex analysis. This book describes through examples how to use the 2D and 3D plot commands together with all of the graphics options. Many of the examples make use of Mathematica programming capabilities to add another dimension of instuction to the text. Mathematica's Help files cover the basics, but if you need professional level results, then turn to this book.

After first flipping through the book I, like another reviewer, was a little overwhelmed. It takes you into complex operations in the very first Fundamentals section. But after popping in the DVD (do this right away) and sitting down to actually work through some of the examples, I saw the light.

This isn't a "M- for Dummies" type of approach where the author consumes 100 pages of narrative on selecting pull-down menus and working gradually through trivial problems to build your confidence--the Guidebook is definitely learn by immersion and active exploration. Think "work the Guidebook" not "read the Guidebook".

The value of Trott's approach is that you're working through the kind of sophisticated problems that prompted you to buy Mathematica in the first place, not over-simplified examples that can be done on a calculator. So there's no leap to make from trivial tutorial to doing your work.

Stopping here, I'd give the book 4 stars because the index is a little scant and the headings/sections structure is hard to discern (both drawbacks when in reference mode).

However, the entire book (plus the other 3 guidebooks) are on the accompanying DVD as nb's. So you don't have to re-key anything, and you can modify and re-eval any of the expressions to better understand what's going on. Another key benefit is that the book structure is much clearer in the nb's so it's easier to reference. Open the table of contents nb which hyperlinks to all the contents and you've got a 5-star resource for doing serious graphics in Mathematica.

This book is not for those who want to either learn mathematica graphics or extend their knowledge, as in my case. It is not clear who the audience is for this book. The book starts with graphics primatives (points, lines, polygons, etc), by page 10 your building 2D plots of rotated Cantor sets that have little to do with the topic at hand. By page 49, examples of inverted Farey fractions illustrate something having to do with Graphics, but what it is has already been lost. It only gets worse, roughly each page has a dense set of mathematica code for generating esoteric graphics. And their is about one to two sentences to describe this code. You are left on your own to unravel it. As and intermediate user of Mathematica and one whose been using it since version 1.0. I find the coding hard to understand. (Remember there is no explation) Thus, this book is not for beginners and folks like me. Its target is for those who work at Wolfram Research, such as the author, and play with Mathemeatica all day. In this case, they already understand the material. This book is a disaster.

Yes there are neat pictures in this book and loads of
mathematica code.
But that's it: no attempt is made to educate the reader: no list of important graphics programming paradigms, general strategies, etc.
This book fails dramatically to meet the high standard set by
the marvelous "mathematica book".

The many bugs and common work-arounds of the mathematica graphics system are not discussed at all.
I would have wished a chapter about what is NOT possible with
mathematica - such a chapter would have saved me a lot of time
wasted in searching.

If you really want to do graphics programming, forget about this book and check the excellent mathematica usegroup instead.

Very bad book! This book, like all the books in the Trotter-Mathematica series is a excellent example of how not to write a good technical book. Presentation of material and ideas do not flow and he makes simple things more complex than they really are by virtue of his inability to communicate ideas in the most direct way. Many good authors have written books on Mathematica such as Bahder or Ruskeepaa. It would have been better if they had written this book as well.