Customer Reviews

Numerical Recipes Code CD-ROM with Windows or Macintosh Single Screen License CD-ROM: Includes Source Code for Numerical Recipes in C, Fortran 77, ... BASIC, Lisp and Modula 2 plus many extras

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This is a disk with programs from the book Numerical Recipes. There are no comments in the code, help file is just an index of routines without any explanations. Routines are translations of Fortran code into C but authors did not make any effort to conform to standard C conventions. All the arrays start at 1 instead of 0 which makes the code useless the way it is written - user must modify it. No const attribute is ever used. And this is plain C so if you write a C++ code and hope for seeing exceptions or references, forget it. You are better off buying a book and writing routines you need based on the published code. It is really a shame that such a thing is sold (and tremendously overpriced). jstrompf@soil.nl in his review obviously meant the book and not the CD-ROM, his positive review is misplaced.

Get the book w/disk. If you're programming numerical routines in C, there's no better place to go. I've used the first edition of the book w/software for more than 10 years and I'll keep using this stuff till the end. Translating from C to C++ has been a very easy task these 10 years. The important thing is that these recipes are fast, intelligently done, and the book (which you should get) explains everything, including the appropriate choice of recipe for your problem. I've used at least 30 of the routines from these guys and they have all been rock solid. If I had a problem with any of them, it was because I messed with the routine, not because there was a problem with the supplied software. I have yet to run into a numerical issue that these guys do not have a great solution for.

Anyone familiar with the book knows that using the book's dynamic memory allocation routines (provided in Appendix D in my edition of the book and included in the software) allows you to start arrays anywhere you like, 0,1, or 1001, it doesn't matter. These dynamic memory allocation routines also have other major advantages such as minimizing the needed memory for a large simulation by allowing you to easily create new arrays as you need them, discard others immediately when you are done with them, adjust the size of an array according to the need at a specific point in your program, etc. Their way of handling this is so convenient that I never have had a memory allocation need that it does not meet. But this is just one detail; the main thing is that their attention to detail is at this level throughout. I cannot imagining going to another reference.

Get the book, read it as needed (you don't need to read a lot to solve a specific programming problem), and do numerical analysis with as much ease as there is to be had in C or C++ programming.

Strange that I should get this book after I stopped using an old fashioned programming language and started using Mathematica.
There are still algorithms used in this text that haven't been "built-in" in Mathematica. Ten years ago I used texts much like this to program
on a daily basis,so I know that although this is well written it still leaves a lot for the programmer to fill in. I even found some material I still need to learn
like boundary value methods in differential equations.
I enjoyed reading this text.

This book was written in 1985 when Pascal was still taught in most colleges. This is part of series called "Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing" which provide explanation and examples of how you can use the computer to help your work. This particular book does not go into detail about the math, but it gives you examples of routines used to solve your particular problem.

Some of the examples listed cover linear algebraic equations, Fourier methods, and partial differential equations. As mentioned, these are written in Pascal, so if you are not familiar with that programming language, these routines will not help you understand the math. If you need to write such routines, and you understand Pascal, this book will help you get ideas for your programming needs.

This is by far my favourite technical book. Somehow, they make the material very living and clear by their informal way of writing. This book is sometimes even fun, just to read it. Nowadays, I mainly use it for linguistic content when I'm writing a technical English text.