Customer Reviews

Numerical Methods for Engineering Application

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Professor Ferziger has provided a useful text for what to me is a nonintuitive subject. Informative cookbooks (e.g., _Numerical_Recipies_) and mathematical monographs are available, but comparitive explanations seem less common. Thus, Dr Ferziger fills a particular need in this field. Comparisons are provided regarding advantages and limitations between various methods, from the ubiquitous Trapezoid rule to less well known Peaceman-Rachford method, among others.

Despite my experience in finite difference analysis for heat transfer problems, there were many aspects regarding stability and convergence of various solution algorithms that I learned from _Numerical_Methods_. Some portions of the text are easier reading than others, depending on familiarity with various techniques and the equation forms to solve. In fluid mechanics, a combination of pressure (elliptic equations) and mass transport (parabolic equations) produce complications that may be difficult to treat. Since heat transfer was my primary computational focus, I found the sections on parabolic solutions easier to grasp than others such as on fast Fourier transforms.

The book's treatment is one of explanation rather than mathematical proofs, albeit with the assumption that differential calculus and some background in discretized equations are understood. Example routines coded in FORTRAN are mentioned in the text and in the appendix, available on a corresponding internet site at Stanford. Overall, a useful reference and helpful addition to an engineer's library.

Treatment is at the right level for engineers and scientists interested in applying concepts without getting bogged down in the underlying mathematics. But beware: the promised code examples that added so much to the first edition, and which I expected when I purchased the second edition, are not in the book. Rather, an appendix refers the reader to a web site at Stanford that is no longer there. The author has died and emails to the publisher and the department at Stanford are unanswered. Had I known, I would have purchased a used copy of the first edition and saved the $100+.