Practical Numerical Methods with C# [Paperback]

Jack Xu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 9, 2008

This book presents an in-depth exposition of the various numerical methods used in real-world scientific and engineering computations. It emphasizes the practical aspects of C# numerical methods and mathematical functions programming, and discusses various techniques in details to enable you to implement these numerical methods in your .NET application. Ideal for scientists, engineers, and students who would like to become more adept at numerical methods, Practical Numerical Methods with C# familiarizes you with: - Overview of C# programming. - The mathematical background and fundamentals of numerical methods. - Math libraries for complex numbers and functions, real and complex vector and matrix operations, and special functions. - Numerical methods for generating random numbers and random distribution functions. - Various numerical methods for solving linear and nonlinear equations. - Numerical differentiation and integration. - Interpolations and curve fitting. - Optimization of single-variable and multi-variable functions with a variety of techniques, including advanced simulated annealing and evolutionary algorithms. - Numerical techniques for solving ordinary differential equations. - Numerical methods for solving boundary value problems. - Eigenvalue problems. In addition, this book provides testing examples for every math function and numerical method to show you how to use these functions and methods in your own .NET applications in a manageable and step-by-step fashion. Please visit the author's website for more information about this book at www.drxudotnet.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: UniCAD, Inc. (December 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979372534
• ISBN-13: 978-0979372537
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good news and bad news, July 30, 2009

By 

Daniel Marivoet (Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Practical Numerical Methods with C# (Paperback)

The bad news is: The author Jack Xu urgently needs to hire a proofreader, this book has many, too many typo's in it!
Even in some titles: IMPLAMENTATION instead of IMPLEMENTATION. It makes you wonder: "How many errors are there in the code?"
The good news is: This is a book that everyone with numerical computer algorithm interest should have! The chapters are well structured and all is well explainded. I typed in a few things myself and it all worked well.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It was a good starting point for me, January 28, 2011

By 

Sam Gilbert "Sam" (Exton, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practical Numerical Methods with C# (Paperback)

I had some high hopes for this book, but it was kind of a letdown. The book is very bare bones; it quickly explains the math and then it gives the simplest possible code that does it. But I was hoping for more explanation as to why certain decisions were made. For example, the numerical differentiation methods are each just separate static methods where you pass everything in and get out a value. Would it be better to have have one method that also takes in an enumeration that flags which algorithm to use? What are the trade-offs of one design over another? Is there any way you can abstract out some of the functionality? Would it make more sense to have a class that represent this instead? There was no discussion like that and this book would benefit greatly from it.

The algorithms also are sometimes missing special cases (for example, the ODE solvers, if the span between xInitial and xFinal is smaller than the step, nothing will catch that. There is an example in the book that should generate wrong numbers because of that, but by pure luck the error bounding shrinks the step size).

I found this book to be a useful place to start. It gave me something to work with that I could be a little confident in. However by the time I had finished the project I was working on I had changed the algorithms I 'needed' from the book into something unrecognizable but much more robust and useful. I had added/changed/improved so much that there was nothing from this book left. After a while, I found it easier to port code from other languages or implement algorithms myself and this book stayed on my shelf. So this book forced me to learn a lot (which I am oddly thankful for), but I feel like it should have taught me more.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Light on Discussion, Strong on Code, February 20, 2009

By 

Another Reader (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practical Numerical Methods with C# (Paperback)

Maybe Xu's latest only rates 4.5 out of 5 stars since the explanations seem terse to this programmer's taste. Nonetheless, you really can't fault a gem with so much great code for a domain rarely visited by .NET.