Re: Useful Dumb User Questions
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg9095] Re: Useful Dumb User Questions
- From: "charles loboz" <charles at please.no.spam.syacus.acus.oz.au>
- Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 23:33:11 -0400
- Organization: Unisys - Roseville, MN
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
You touch upon two different issues in your mail. I totally agree with the first one - a shabby treatment of mma users by wri, selling - very much needed - bug fix release as a significant upgrade. I bought my 10 months ago for a full price and now they want 700 A$ for 3.0.1 upgrade. I think they have also some other off-putting problems. I tend to disagree with you on the second issue - poor documentation. It gets some time to get used to - but after that it is quite good. I even started to appreciate the thick book - the mma manual. I think it is a bit like UNIX documentation - once you are 'in' it is very good, concise and precise. As to other books - they definitely vary in quality. I found 'mma - a guide for physicists' (or something like that) a very good introductory text - and there are other very good ones as well (Gray for example). For real mma style programming my personal favourities are Meader and the recent 'power programming - the kernel' - definitely worth the money. In general I think there are many good books on mma - but all books on mma are good. Sergio Rojas <sergio at scisun.sci.ccny.cuny.edu> wrote in article <61hsno$dbs at smc.vnet.net>... > charles loboz (charles at please.no.spam.syacus.acus.oz.au) wrote: > : Mark Evans <evans at gte.net> wrote in article <61cog3$4in at smc.vnet.net>... > > : Mathematica is a sophisticated product for doing very sophisticated things. > : Trying to compare it to Microsoft products, which are intended for > : mass-market and are doing relatively (to mma) simple things is wrong. > > I have the impression that converting Mathematica in a mass-market > product is the main concern of WRI rather than improving the > package. It comes to my mind all that expectation created by WRI > before "launching" Mathematica 3.0. At the end the product came out > with so many bugs. Now those who, impressed by the WRI propaganda, > bough the product in its early release have to pay more to get a patch. > Why not provide the users 0f 3.0 with a free upgrade? It remains me > that something similar happen with the pentium bug with the difference > that Intel replace for free theirs fault. > > On the other hand, instead of finding the package difficult to learn or > understand, I found it poorly documented. Only a few well written books > can be found in the market, and the reason is probably the desire of > making money rather than documenting the package in the appropriated way. > Fortunately there is this group where one can interact and cover the > deficiencies in documentation. > > Rojas > > >