Re: Mathematica GuideBooks
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg61942] Re: [mg61916] Mathematica GuideBooks
- From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
- Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2005 01:52:36 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
On 4 Nov 2005, at 19:11, Steven T. Hatton wrote: > Are there any special discounts if we purchase the Mathematica > GuideBooks > together? Have any of you used these? Care to comment on them? I have already commented on this here more than once, so this time I will be very brief. I use them all the time and I think they are great. But whether you or anyone else will like them depends a lot how you use Mathematica and for what purpose. I read the complete Guidebooks just once, in a pre-release version. Since then I have returned to them on numerous occasions, but in about 90% of cases I return to study solved problems or look at hints and suggestions for exercises. I think these are the most valuable thing about the book. You can find there a treasury of interesting ideas, some of which must have taken Michael many hours of thinking and experimenting. Of course this will be true only for persons whose principal interest lies in applying Mathematica to solving problems in mathematics or mathematical physics. In this respect the Guidebooks are in a class of their own. In fact, as far as I know there is nothing that remotely compares with them in respect of the width of the range of serious problems tackled with the help of Mathematica. The Guidebooks are also great on graphics, particularly those related to more advanced mathematical topics. But if you are interested primarily in the programming language itself or in issues related to the FrontEnd, typesetting, MathLink etc, then you had better look elsewhere. (Actually the GuideBooks are pretty good on Kernel programming, but the well known book of David Wagner goes deeper). Andrzej Kozlowski