Recommendations for a programming book?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg55752] Recommendations for a programming book?
- From: David Kirkby <david.kirkby at onetel.net>
- Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 03:21:51 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Has anyone got any recommendations for books on Mathematica programming - i.e writing packages for a set of routines you develop for your own (or others) use, packing them together properly, documenting them for the user etc? Insuring routines that are used internally (private) in your package are not visable to the user when he/she reads it in to their Mathematica session, whereas the ones you intend (public) are fully documented. I have the book "Programming in Mathematica" by Roman Maeder (1989), based on version 1.2 of Mathematica. This assumes some familiarity with the program, so does *not* start with 1+1=2. I like the book, but thought it might be a bit dated now - remember my copy is 6 years old. I thought perhaps there would be something to be gained by a more up to date book than the old copy of Maeder's I have, So I bought "The Mathematica Guidebook for Programming" by Michael Trott: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387942823/qid=1112651074/sr=8-4/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i4_xgl/026-8217107-8364418 but it was not what I expected. My mis-understanding of the title I think. The first example in the book is In[1]:= 1+1 Out[1]= 2 and then seems to repeat much of what there is in Steven Wolfram's book "The Mathematica Book" The book seems to have a huge number of unnecessary references - there is over 1100 references in the introductory Chapter 1, and other chapters have hundreds of references each. I only got the book today, so have not looked at it carefully, but it certainly does not fill the gap I was looking to fill. It does however look quite a reasonable introduction to Mathematica, and is a little more manageable in size than the official book - although still quite big. PS for anyone in the UK thinking of buying this book, or the Mathematica book by Wolfram, I suggest you click on the "New and used" section of the Amazon site. Often there are dealers in the USA who will ship a new copy of the book to you for a *lot* less than Amazon UK sell it for directly. You can save over £8 on the Mathematica Book, and I saved twenty odd pounds on the Trott book. It seems strange Amazon providing links to dealers undercutting them by a lot, but I guess they get some share of the profits when you buy via the Amazon site. -- Dr. David Kirkby, G8WRB Please check out http://www.g8wrb.org/ of if you live in Essex http://www.southminster-branch-line.org.uk/