Customer Reviews

C Programming: The Essentials for Engineers and Scientists (Undergraduate Texts in Computer Science)

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Most C-programming books are very thick and the authors spend a lot of pages in explaining historical and detailed aspects of the C-language. As a chemist I often get frustrated when reading these type of books since it takes about 250 pages before they e.g. explain how to read or write to a file. When you finish the books you are not at a level of solving real problems in C. C programming: The Essentials for Engineers and Scientists by David R. Brooks goes, as the title says, directly to the essentials for a scientist. The book is based on a five-step problem solving procedure throughout the book. This way of structural-thinking, which is often neglected in other books, helps the reader to get a good programming habit in any programming language. Since the book is very problem oriented, the author is able to cover more advanced programming topics than other C-books. The book is designed for undergraduate studies without any knowledge in programming, but may be used by anyone interested in learning C. Many programming examples and exercises are taken from the field of chemistry and physics and thus, the book is perfect as a introduction course in C for chemists and physicists.

It is very good book for beginners that need to make a C program not very complicated but quickly to solve a problem.

This is possibly the best book I've ever seen for engineers and scientists trying to learn how to program in C. However, supplementary material that aids in learning examples found in this book no longer exist. I wrote the author an email asking why his website for his c-code examples no longer exist, and I was informed that the book is "too old!" Without the supplementary material I need, I'm sure I will have a difficult time learning chapter 3 when it requires c-code created in chapter 6.