Mathematica Graphics Book Review...
- To: mathgroup@smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg11398] Mathematica Graphics Book Review...
- From: Xah Lee <xah@best.com>
- Date: Sun, 8 Mar 1998 20:13:20 -0500
- References: <6do1s9$les@smc.vnet.net>
P.J.Hinton expressed that: >A good reference on graphics programming is the book _Mathematica >Graphics: Techniques and Applications_ by Tom Wickham-Jones. > >http://store.wolfram.com/view/ISBN0387940472/ Many people have mentioned this book. My personal opinion is that this is not a quality book, but remains useful because its uniqueness and programs, more or less. A similar book is _Mathematica Graphics Guide_ by Cameron Smith, Nancy Blackman. This is a good book. This book focuses on a comprehensive and detailed documention of Mathematica graphics functions (and options). Very good for graphics programers. No applications or programs are given, however. Another person who posted here, has written reviews in printed publications on both books. (I forgot his name and the journal) He has expressed similar opinion as mine. If you have used both books, readers of this group probably like to hear your opinion. -- >A book with lots of examples is _Illustrated Mathematics: Visualization >of Mathematical Objects with Mathematica_ by Gloor et al.: > >http://store.wolfram.com/view/ISBN0387142223/ I was very disappointed with this book. In my opinion, this is not a quality book. It may be good for, say, highschool or freshmen math educators. This CD book is mostly a collections of packages. There is a very thin printed manual that is an introduction on what's on the CD. Each package on CD has a documentation notebook. Most or all packages has to do with generating graphics of its subject, i.e. visualization. This book does not teach mathematics in any way, nor do readers learn Mathematica programing from it. The value of this CD is this visualization packages. Here is the listing of the subjects of the packages: Analysis.ma, Chaos.ma ComplexFunctions.ma ComplexMap.ma ConicSections.ma Differentiation.ma Icosahedra.ma Integration.ma LinearMaps.ma MinimalSurfaces.ma ODEs.ma Polyhedra.ma Revolution.ma RollingCircles.ma Sequences.ma Series.ma TrigFunctions.ma The CD consists of the packages, their documentation notebook (listed above), and many other notebooks that contains pre-made animation and graphics of these packages. My primary complaint about this CD is that there isn't any tutorial, article, or essay. Going through these notebook docs is quite dry, unless you already have strong interest in certain topics. (But if you do, you'll find most of these packages relatively feeble.) In analogy, it's like you have a CD of all the Standard Packages and their docs with pre-saved outputs (graphics). I doubt anyone finds fun in reading the packages as if they are reading a book. The package documentation on the CD is even lesser in quality and quantity than the Standard Guide To Packages. They mostly consists of pre-executed usage messages and some minor added text and examples. My second complaint is that the graphics are not made with perfection in mind. For example, basically all graphics are in 256 color, and are repeatitious. I would think that just one or two quality pre-generated graphics will suffice. The user should use the package to generate their own. The animations are fairly primitive. There's no visual enlightenment, discovery, or artistic satisfaction. For example, the MinimalSurfaces.ma notebook contains an animation of rotating a minimal surface, and the Revolution.m contains --what else-- boring pre-generated low-quality surface of revolutions -- all in fat PostScript. This is really a waste of space. The CD is packed to its 600+ megabytes of capacity, but the contents are truely sparce, consisting just the above mentioned notebooks and packages. The space are mostly used by those pre-generated boring graphics and animations. or old time Mathematica users, we know most of these packages can be obtained free somewhere else. For example, the Revolution, Icosohedra, ComplexMap, RollingCircles, Polyhedra... are all available either as Standard package, or book and journal's electronic content archived on MathSource. Lastly, the whole CD is for Mathematica version 2.x. If you have v.3, you probably would find better value in other books than this CD. If you are an educator and use v.2.x only, it is possible that you find this CD a good collection of examples. (I will sell or trade this CD with your Mathematica book.) -- I believe a promising book on samples of Mathematica graphics is Michael Trott's _Mathematica Guidebook_. This book has been in advertisement since 1995 but still not out (I believe). Michael Trott works at Wolfram, and is one of the priciple graphics coder at Wolfram. Almost all the interesting graphics you see between pages in The Mathematica book is done by him. Occationally, he posts here. Xah, xah@best.com http://www.best.com/~xah/Wallpaper_dir/c0_WallPaper.html "Unix -- the progenitor of everything sucks."