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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."




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