Customer Reviews

Open Source Physics: A User's Guide with Examples (3rd Edition)

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While I understand it is nigh impossible for a physics text to be completely without typos, and I have never been a huge fan of the Addison-Wesley editorial department, but they have outdone themselves with the utter lack of proof-reading for a supposedly mature third edition text.
Moving on, this book is essentially about implementing computational methods in the Java environment. This is fine and there are lots of nice routines available in the open source physics repository. (I do question the use of java as a high performance platform, however). Unfortunately, this book presents very few examples for implementing the aforementioned routines and the most of the few examples have critical typos (You cannot even complete the steps for his hello world! example as there are typos in the directory structure presented!).
Possibly the only saving grace of the book is the brief mention of Easy Java Simulations (EJS) - A visual platform for generating applets making actual use of the open source physics repositiores. However, the author cannot spare the breath to walk you through an EJS project with any depth, which would give this book an actual reason for taking up space on your book shelf.

Bottom Line- Stay away unless you absolutely need a Java implementation of your physics models, and even then Easy Java Simulations is a more tractable place to begin.

Some years ago I was looking for a scientific Java library that I could use for my petroleum engineering activities. There are dozens of these libraries that can be found in the web. The Open Source Physics library was exactly what I was looking for: it is simple to use, functions are intuitive, classes are very powerful, and the best of all is that the visualization part has been done beautifully perfect; you can start producing your scientific or engineering applications in few minutes without focusing too much on the code. That's where the OSP library shines.

Both books, the "Computer Simulation Methods" and the "User Guide" are an excellent point of start if you are either starting scientific computing by your own or using it as a part of a course. I haven't seen this quality of books before. It amazes me how well the authors explain the physics behind the phenomena. Once you understand it, then they explain the coding without spending too much time in programming. Well, it was written by physicists not programmers. But it you see the code, because is open source, it has been programmed which such taste, structure and organization that is even an outstanding guide on how to write scientific libraries. You can learn good Java habits from here.

This is the second time that I am buying these books; my first set I gave it as a gift to one of my best friends in Peru who was working on an oil wells drilling monitoring application in Java.

The extra is that a physicist in Spain used the OSP libraries as the core for a simulation application called Easy Java Simulations or EJS. Well, I can tell you, that mix is very, very powerful. The EJS environment allows you write your algorithm, function, module, or application in a breeze focusing on the math or the physics instead of the coding for the input or the output. As a matter of fact it took me few minutes to create the graphical interface, the plots and the correlation functions for a PVT application that will find the best oil correlation for a given PVT point.