Customer Reviews

Numerical Methods for Engineers

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I teach Numerical Methods at undergraduate level in Mexico, and I have used "Numerical Methods for Engineers" during several years.

I like this book because of its approach to learning: each part contains Motivation, Mathematical Background and Orientation, then the numerical methods and finally an Epilogue.

Also, the number and variety of the problems presented contribute to accomplish our educational objectives, and the emphasis made on the growing use of software packages (MATLAB, Excel, Mathcad and IMSL) makes this book more useful for students and instructors.

This is an extensive book (more than 900 pages) and perhaps some parts of it must be omitted during a normal course (4 months, 4 hours per week in our case).

I think that the book price of the English edition (Hardcover) is high. Fortunately for our students, there is a cheaper Spanish version, although the translation is not very good (not in the technical sense but in writing and style).

In conclusion, I recommend the book to students and instructors as a comprehensive, learning oriented text with many problems in several engineering areas, and emphasis on the use of software packages, suitable to be used as textbook of numerical methods with extensive use of software.

I bought this book a little while ago to get more familiar with interpolation which I need to use in some of the signal analysis software that I write. As I was reading through the book I suddenly realized the overall usefulness of numerical methods in general. It has helped me code up routines for solving matrices and interpolation algorithms. After reading this book I really can not understand how courses in linear algebra and differential equations can be taught without extensive use of numerical methods.

This book has really opened my eyes to a whole new way of solving engineering problems.

Andy (andys@d2d.com)

this book is $55 on barnes and noble book store and is $67 on border bookstore. your price is too high

I've noticed several reviewers have benifited from this book as a reference for algorithms in specific topics, which is something the book is really good at in my opinion.

However, we studied the book as a junior level textbook in numerical methods and went into many problems in doing so. Although the motiviation is well, the presentation is not. For example, the parts on Fourier Approximation (Chapter 19), and Finite Difference: Elliptic Equations (Chapter 29) really do require good background knowledge on behalf of the reader, and the authors sometimes rush into the approximation techniques with hardly any explination of the underlying logic.

For undergraduate students, I don't believe this book is good for self-teaching. More elaboration is needed in the derivations of the nemurical techniques, and without that, many of us were lost when it came to homeworks and computer projects.

On the bright side, The graphs are excellent , and the book covers a very wide range of topics and presents many codes and worked out examples.

This book explains many, many procedures in the world of computational analysis. It procides clear examples, easy to read pseudo-code, and follow-up problems. Concise and short reading sections provide a quick and ease pace to learn. After a poor background with programming this book helped me get off the right foot!

I had this book since school, more than ten years now. I still used it all the time. It is easy and simple if you are looking to implement a method in software. It will give you a good understanding of the basics and the theory. In addition to the straightforward formulas that you can plug into your code easily.

This book came in great shape and I'm able to use it quite well for class. Real happy with it.

If you are a programmer who must work with calculation intensive algorithms, you will need a book such as this. The chapters are well written and cover many subjects which are easily forgotten when not used often. The section explaining the difference between precision and accuracy is quite good.

Also worthy of personal praise is the suggestion that piecemeal cubic spline approximations more accurately reflect abrupt (zonal) shifts in the data, better than do higher order polynomical approximations.

The book seems to cover most of the subjects that a non-specialist programmer might need, when confronted with a numerical methods prospect. Topics include: matrix reduction, numerical differentiation and integration, truncated series approximations, curve fitting and fast fourier transforms to name a few. It also deals extensively with the nitty-gritty of computing, from bits, bytes and numerical representations; to MatLab, MathCAD, and Fortran.

Easy to follow with excelant explanations and evaluations of the methods and their value with regards to other methods.

Book is very good. it has many numerical methods explained very simply.
I would recommend this book to all civil engineer scientist, and also students who found numerical methods interesting to study, and to use it for application to real world.
I would gave this book a 5star mark but i gave it only 4 because price. I also believe that the price is too high.