Book announcement
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg4125] Book announcement
- From: wagner at motel6.cs.colorado.edu (Dave Wagner)
- Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 01:39:35 -0400
- Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
I'm very pleased to announce that my new book, "Power Programming with Mathematica: The Kernel" (McGraw-Hill), will be available soon (it's at the printer right now). You can preview the Preface, Table of Contents, and Introduction at http://www.princon.com/princon/PPK/description.html. I've appended an abbreviated table of contents and some excerpts from the preface below. Dave Wagner Principia Consulting (303) 786-8371 dbwagner at princon.com http://www.princon.com/princon ---------------------------------------------- Power Programming with Mathematica: The Kernel ---------------------------------------------- Contents ---------------------------------------------- Preface 1 Introduction 2 Language Fundamentals 3 Lists and Strings 4 Procedural Programming 5 Functional Programming 6 Rule-Based Programming 7 Expression Evaluation 8 Writing Packages 9 Details, Details 10 Performance Tuning 11 MathLink 12 Input/Output 13 Debugging Bibliography Index ---------------- ---------------- There are scores of <I>Mathematica</I> books available today; why bring yet another one into the world? I wrote this book to give <I>Mathematica</I> users a comprehensive source for learning how to program in <I>Mathematica</I>. There are two parts of this statement that I want to stress: comprehensive and learning how to program. Regarding learning how to program: The majority of existing books about <I>Mathematica</I> are example-based texts in a particular area of application. Some appear to be programming books, but typically the author covers just enough about <I>Mathematica</I> programming to get to "the good stuff" - that is, applying Mathematica to his or her area of specialization. I, on the other hand, am a computer scientist, not a mathematician, physicist, or engineer. To me, the programming <I>is</I> the good stuff. This book is a reflection of how a computer scientist sees <I>Mathematica</I> - a viewpoint that is, in my opinion, sorely under-represented in the existing literature. Regarding comprehensiveness: Certain topics, such as debugging, performance tuning, and <I>MathLink</I>, are almost always given short shrift in the existing literature - and there is no single source that discusses all of them. This book devotes an entire chapter to each of those topics. Furthermore, many of the advanced <I>Mathematica</I> programming techniques found here have not appeared in any other book. I have spent the last two years scouring many sources for this information, including Wolfram Research technical reports, conference papers, journal articles, packages, and Internet discussion groups. I also have discussed many issues directly with <I>Mathematica</I>'s developers. As a result, I believe that this book makes a needed contribution to the <I>Mathematica</I> literature. Almost any <I>Mathematica</I> user, at any level of expertise, should find things in this book that she does not already know. At the same time, the book does not skip over the fundamentals, so it is accessible to persons who are just getting their feet wet in <I>Mathematica</I> programming. The audience for this book consists of <I>Mathematica</I> users who want to start writing programs, or who simply have a nagging feeling that the ways they solve their problems could be improved. In addition, <I>Mathematica</I> programmers who want to write significant extensions to the system will find this book valuable. This book is current as of version 3.0 of <I>Mathematica</I>. The electronic supplement contains four major components: answers to most of the exercises, source code for the <I>MathLink</I> programs in Chapter 11, data files for the examples in Chapter 12, and packages that are developed throughout the book. ******************** There's much, much more on the Web site - Please check it out at your leisure! http://www.princon.com/princon/PPK/description.html http://www.princon.com/princon/PPK/preface.html http://www.princon.com/princon/PPK/contents.html http://www.princon.com/princon/PPK/introduction.html ******************** ==== [MESSAGE SEPARATOR] ====