Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing (Hardcover)

by William H. Press (Author), Brian P. Flannery (Author), Saul A. Teukolsky (Author), William T. Vetterling (Author) "This book, like its predecessor edition, is supposed to teach you methods of numerical computing that are practical, efficient, and (insofar as possible) elegant..." (more)
Key Phrases: int isign, void nrerror, unsigned long ija, New York, Englewood Cliffs, Monte Carlo (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"...an instant `classic,' a book that should be purchased and read by anyone who uses numerical methods..." American Journal of Physics

"No matter what language you program in, these packages are classics, both as a textbook or reference. They are an essential and valuable addition to the academic, professional, or personal library." Internet

"The new book exceeds, if possible, the excellence of its predecessor: it is about 50 percent longer and has been thoroughly updated...The bibliographical material has been considerably extended and updated...For new users, it is sufficient to say that practically every aspect of numerical analysis is covered...This monumental and classic work is beautifully produced and of literary as well as mathematical quality. It is an essential component of any serious scientific or engineering library." A. D. Booth, Computing Reviews

"If you already have the first edition, will you want or need the second? The answer is a definitive yes...a book that should be on your desk (not your shelf) if you have any interest in the analysis of data or the formulation of models." Lyle W. Konigsberg, Human Biology

"...the second [edition] expands the scope of coverage and continues the standard of excellence achieved in the first. If you were to have only a single book on numerical methods, this is the one I would recommend." Edmund Miller, IEEE Computational Science & Engineering

"...remarkably complete...it contains many more routines than many commercial mathematics packages..." Byte

"The authors are to be congratulated for providing the scientific community with a valuable resource." The Scientist

"...replete with the standard spectrum of mathematically pretreated and coded/numerical routines for linear equations, matrices and arrays, curves, splines, polynomials, functions, roots, series, integrals, eigenvectors, FFT and other transforms, distributions, statistics, and on to ODE's and PDE's...such an education...is delightful..." Physics in Canada

Product Description
The product of a unique collaboration among four leading scientists in academic research and industry, Numerical Recipes is a complete text and reference book on scientific computing. In a self-contained manner it proceeds from mathematical and theoretical considerations to actual practical computer routines. With over 100 new routines bringing the total to well over 300, plus upgraded versions of the original routines, the new edition remains the most practical, comprehensive handbook of scientific computing available today.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 994 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 2 edition (October 30, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521431085
• ISBN-13: 978-0521431088
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.2 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #219,733 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Check GNU Scientific Library first, September 21, 2003

By A Customer

I give the book 4 stars to maintain the current level. I own a Fortran copy of NR, but like the other authors, I like NR for the explanations of algorithms, but not for the code.

There is a VERY good alternative to Numerical Recipes in C, namely GNU Scientific Library. You can find the source code and manual from:

http://sources.redhat.com/gsl/

or

http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl

As typical GNU software, GSL is licensed under GNU General Public License, so it is ABSOLUTELY free ! You can download it, modify it, linked it with your own code, without feeling guilty of copyright violation (Not in the case of NR, NR comes with a copyright license to prohibit modification and linking).

GSL is written in C from scratch by its author. The design is modern, much better than NR in C, and also allowed linking with C++ or modern scripting language like Python. Some of the leading authors have background in theoretical physics and astrophysics, just like NR authors.

Check it out. You lose nothing to check GSL first, you may ended up saving some $$$.

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Proprietary source the Achilles' heel for non-students, December 4, 2002

By A Customer

I first bought the FORTRAN version of this text in 1994 while doing scientific programming for graduate school work. I've been able to do a lot of basic research quickly with NR codes, and I still occasionally use NR's routines. The authors have certainly done a good job assimilating a lot of material in the NR series. Since other reviewers have done well to highlight the importance and utility of this landmark series, there is no need to repeat those sentiments here. I also agree with earlier reviewers applauding this title more as a survey or reference work and less as a library of source code. However, to this title's detriment, the authors actually consider the NR series to be a proprietary library of source code more valuable than the explanatory text surrounding it (one can in fact download the text on-line from the publisher though it's hardly worth the hassle). This perception is ironic since the authors confess that "the lineage of many programs in common circulation is often unclear," and many details of presentation, ideas, and algorithms are clearly "borrowed" from other excellent (some now out-of-print) numerical methods books or journals.

Unfortunately, much of the source code in the 1993 C edition appears FORTRANish and is not very efficient as far as the C language goes (one would hope that improvements are coming in the new C edition, ISBN 0521574382). However, even the original FORTRAN NR routines occasionally adopted bizarre and/or obviously inefficient programming structures - over time I decided that this was probably done to make these algorithms appear as so not to obviously plagerize other published material.

Many programmers try to get around this by reworking the NR codes. Apparently the authors consider modification of their sometimes inefficient code "derivative works" (even bug fixes) which cannot be legally redistributed or even used on more than one machine at a time without purchasing a new license or book. As a student, NR's legal disclaimers regarding derivative works never bothered me and I was willing to overlook the sometimes unpolished source code insofar as it functioned properly. But as a professional, I now find the lack of fair-use provisions on uncompiled, derivative source way too restrictive to rely on them in good conscience. I have since expanded my numerical methods library to other references supporting true public-domain codes. With an expanded basis of comparison, I regret to say that I am becoming less and less impressed with NR's implementations and explanations. I am finding some of NR's algorithms to be inefficient or unnecessarily approximate, and - on rare occasion - buggy. There have been quite a few bugs uncovered over the years, although the NR web site has done a good job of keeping track of them.

In closing, this book is excellent for students wanting a good reference for quick and dirty types of analyses or scientific computing. Professional programmers, scientists, engineers, specialists or analysts performing research would be well advised to reference this title, but ultimately they will likely need to rely other resources if they require efficient and/or unrestricted (public-domain) source codes for their work.

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Useful Tool, but Know its Limitations, March 18, 2001

By	Elderbear (Loma Linda, Aztlan) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Numerical Recipes is the perfect book for a programmer who took the required math classes and has since forgotten much of the material. Here you will encounter brief, theoretical discussions about how to solve common numerical problems, followed by implementations in C, and finished off with a few suggestions for further reading.

I've actually found the explanations about how to solve problems more useful than the code they provide. Their C coding style seems to harken back to FORTRAN days. I've also translated from C to MatLab and IDL in some instances (on one occasion, translating the MatLab routine back to C a few years later!)

Elsewhere on the net, mathematical critiques can be found. If you're trying to solve a critical problem, hunt these down. It bothered me to find vectors referenced from 1 to n as opposed to 0 to n-1, the way I'm used to seeing them in C code.

But, for practical use, this book is difficult to beat. It makes, at the very least, a great starting point, especially for those of us who last took a math class 18 years ago and find the details foggy. Kind of like The Joy of Cooking. A good, basic reference to keep around, but not the final word on gourmet programming.