Numerical Recipes 3rd Edition: The Art of Scientific Computing [Hardcover]

William H. Press (Author), Saul A. Teukolsky (Author), William T. Vetterling (Author), Brian P. Flannery (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0521880688 | ISBN-13: 978-0521880688 | Edition: 3

Co-authored by four leading scientists from academia and industry, Numerical Recipes Third Edition starts with basic mathematics and computer science and proceeds to complete, working routines. Widely recognized as the most comprehensive, accessible and practical basis for scientific computing, this new edition incorporates more than 400 Numerical Recipes routines, many of them new or upgraded. The executable C++ code, now printed in color for easy reading, adopts an object-oriented style particularly suited to scientific applications. The whole book is presented in the informal, easy-to-read style that made earlier editions so popular. Please visit www.nr.com or www.cambridge.org/us/numericalrecipes for more details. More information concerning licenses is available at: www.nr.com/licenses New key features:

• 2 new chapters, 25 new sections, 25% longer than Second Edition
• Thorough upgrades throughout the text
• Over 100 completely new routines and upgrades of many more.
• New Classification and Inference chapter, including Gaussian mixture models, HMMs, hierarchical clustering, Support Vector Machines
• New Computational Geometry chapter covers KD trees, quad- and octrees, Delaunay triangulation, and algorithms for lines, polygons, triangles, and spheres
• New sections include interior point methods for linear programming, Monte Carlo Markov Chains, spectral and pseudospectral methods for PDEs, and many new statistical distributions
• An expanded treatment of ODEs with completely new routines

Plus comprehensive coverage of

• linear algebra, interpolation, special functions, random numbers, nonlinear sets of equations, optimization, eigensystems, Fourier methods and wavelets, statistical tests, ODEs and PDEs, integral equations, and inverse theory

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This monumental and classic work is beautifully produced and of literary as well as mathematical quality. It is an essential component of any serious scientific or engineering library."
Computing Reviews

"... an instant 'classic,' a book that should be purchased and read by anyone who uses numerical methods ..."
American Journal of Physics

"... replete with the standard spectrum of mathematically pretreated and coded/numerical routines for linear equations, matrices and arrays, curves, splines, polynomials, functions, roots, series, integrals, eigenvectors, FFT and other transforms, distributions, statistics, and on to ODE's and PDE's ... delightful."
Physics in Canada

"... if you were to have only a single book on numerical methods, this is the one I would recommend."
EEE Computational Science & Engineering

"This encyclopedic book should be read (or at least owned) not only by those who must roll their own numerical methods, but by all who must use prepackaged programs."
New Scientist

"These books are a must for anyone doing scientific computing."
Journal of the American Chemical Society

"The authors are to be congratulated for providing the scientific community with a valuable resource."
The Scientist

"I think this is an incredibly valuable book for both learning and reference and I recommend it for any scientists or student in a numerate discipline who need to understand and/or program numerical algorithms."
International Association for Pattern Recognition

"The attractive style of the text and the availability of the codes ensured the popularity of the previous editions and also recommended this recent volume to different categories of readers, more or less experienced in numerical computation."
Octavian Pastravanu, Zentralblatt MATH

Book Description

The third edition of Numerical Recipes has wider coverage than ever before. New chapters cover classification and inference and computational geometry; new sections include MCMC, interior point methods, and an updated, expanded treatment of ODEs, all with completely new routines in C++. For more information, or to buy the book, visit www.cambridge.org/numericalrecipes. For support, or to subscribe to an online version, please visit www.nr.com.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1256 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 3 edition (September 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521880688
• ISBN-13: 978-0521880688
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.8 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #88,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #64 in Books > Computers & Technology > Software > Mathematical & Statistical

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 75 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A licensing disaster December 1, 2009

By Ken Williams

Format:Hardcover

As other reviewers have mentioned, this is basically an annotated code repository of solutions to specific algorithmic problems, and the algorithms are good. However, if you want to *use* these solutions in your products, forget it. You'll need to pay (thousands of dollars per year, potentially) for the privilege of an institutional license, and even then you can't incorporate any of the algorithms into a commercial software product. The code is therefore useless. Worse than useless, actually, because if a company owns the book and then uses an algorithm contained in it - even if derived from a different source - it runs the risk of getting sued for licensing violations because they've seen the book. No thanks.

[...]

If the authors went with some kind of traditional open-source license instead, that would be terrific. Right now, it looks like financial greed has gotten in the way of the dissemination of good ideas.

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Valuable book, but not worth an upgrade June 28, 2008

By K. Dixon

Format:Hardcover

Bottom line up front: Every computational scientist should own a copy of Numerical Recipes but, if you already own a previous version, then don't bother upgrading.

I already owned a copy of "Numerical Recipes in C, 2nd Edition" (from 1992), so I was absolutely thrilled when I saw that the book had been updated in over 15 years. This is why I was so underwhelmed with the 3rd edition. As a previous reviewer noted, the vast majority of the book is largely unchanged.

As in previous editions, the authors do a great job of providing codes that cover the spectrum of topics encountered by researchers. As in previous editions, the authors still take the "give a man a fish" instead of the "teach a man to fish" method. This might seem like a negative but, in my opinion, this is why every scientist should own a copy of Numerical Recipes. Often, topics pop up that need immediate solving and one can often find a code for the topic in Numerical Recipes. As in previous editions, Numerical Recipes is really just an annotated code repository, with very stringent/restrictive licensing rules by the way!

However, as the authors note in the introduction, they made a conscious decision to fill pages with verbatim codes, not building insight into various topics. In my experience, the codes given in Numerical Recipes get the job done, but these tend to be simple and less efficient than other well-known algorithms.

As in previous editions, Numerical Recipes is a terrible pedagogical text. If you're interesting in understanding a particular topic, then get a special-purpose book.

75 of 80 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Copyright Idiocy! March 26, 2010

By David Bruce

Format:Hardcover

People, stop buying and using this book! The copyright is prohibitive. It is not that they are greedy and want to make money from it. They won't sell you the rights to use any of these algorithms in commercial products, period. They are just stupid.

And don't give your code to a friend or coworker. You just violated the copyright.

Several coworkers have given me simulations with NR code buried in it. I can't use them. It is ILLEGAL!

Stop! Stop! Stop!

Use the GNU Scientific Library. It is free. And legal! And there is a free book on it. Use anything but NR.