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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Top-notch programs, but unforgivable text misprints., July 28, 1999
By A Customer
The misspelling on the cover (developement) is a portent of what lies within. This book covers a lot of good material, and the programs are well-written. If I could stop here the book would rate five stars.Unfortunately, the text is loaded with typographical errors, more than I have ever seen before in a hardback. If you are willing to decipher the text, you will find that Mr. Herkommer has put together a nice package of number-theoretic programs. I enjoyed the book despite its shortcomings.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A terrific book, if you can get over the misprints., June 21, 1999
This book is for anyone who is interested in reproducing or applying number-theoretic results in C. The central problem is that it appears that the book has not been copy-edited, nor is there any evidence that it has been proof-read. Indeed, this is easily the most typo-riddled book that I have ever encountered. Sometimes the typos are just annoying, at other times they create a real obstacle to understanding. For example, anyone wishing to learn about the four color theorem will have to look elsewhere--the short discussion is marred by a nonsensical sentence. The proof of the claim that there is no highest prime also contains a fatal misprint. And the discussion of the Greatest Common Divisor seems to distinguish between two functions, gcd and GCD. But, after much re-reading, it is clear that this is not the case. That McGraw Hill should charge $65 for this is obscene. The presence of misprints in a technical book is particularly unforgivable, for each newly-discovered misprint significantly undermines the reader's confidence in the accuracy of a given proof or claim. That said, two minor cavils: (1) The discussion of complexity theory easily assumes as much as it delivers. Anyone hoping to learn about measuring algorithmic complexity should go somewhere else. (2) The author cites a book published in 1971 as containing the first formal statement of the principle of mathematical induction; evidently he is not aware that Frege gave a formal proof of the principle in 1879. Finally: I would have given the book five stars if it had not been so badly produced (there really is a lot of good stuff here that can't be found anywhere else), but since McGraw-Hill did such a shoddy job, I can only give it three. NB: A previous reader complains that she cannot locate a header file (numtype.h) that is essential for running any of the programs in this book. Hello! It's on the cd that comes with the book--you can't miss it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good code, mediocre explanations, rampant typos, August 6, 2000
By A Customer
I agree with the other reviewers concerning good code and rampant typos. However, the author seems to think the audience is captive, and is willing to put up with his idiosynchracies. [I for one am not.] As an example, much discussion is devoted to the comparison of the GCD algorithm variants, so much so that one of the variants, Left Shift Binary, is "name-dropped" in the middle of the text, leaving the reader wondering why it deserves mention. The Least Remainder variant is missing critical information on the modulo arithmetic operation - namely, that '%' gives the same result on argument pairs with differing signs, even though the quotient is not the same as with same sign pairs. '%' just works, and that's all we are expected to care about. Overall, the book appears more like a user manual: the code works, and is packaged for the user. Code applications are covered in the "manual".
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