Customer Reviews

A Scientist's and Engineer's Guide to Workstations and Supercomputers: Coping with Unix, RISC, Vectors, and Programming

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As another reviewer has mentioned, the book is very practical. It treats almost all the topics you will sometime encounter in your scientific/research career, if you work on Unix systems. I could have saved a lot of time looking for freeware had I first looked in this book. The book covers the use of gnuplot, the free plotting program, and also mentions many very useful utilities. Personally, I downloaded xmgrace, a superb graphing free software. Customizing xterm windows and the motif window manager are some of the other things I found interesting. Now, my workstation menu features everything I will use in the course of the day. (Much like windows 95, only more powerful). It took me two years to learn through trial what is here!

It's a wonderful book for both beginner and advanced users of UNIX system. Its comprehensive contents help me learn every aspects of UNIX needed in scientific field. I learned many new things by reading this book. I am very exciting.

I would echo the other favorable reviews. This is a good book on Unix for scientific programmers. Since the book was written in 1993, predating widespread adoption of Linux, there is a lot of material on commercial versions of Unix that is less important now. The Unix shell languages and tools such as make, sed and awk are mentioned, but not scripting languages such as Python and Perl. The gnuplot graphing program is discussed. The scientific programming languages discussed are Fortran 77 and C.

Since used copies of the book are available inexpensively, I recommend it to scientific programmers using Linux.