Re: Sample Workbooks - Suggested sources to get a newbie going?
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- Subject: [mg130438] Re: Sample Workbooks - Suggested sources to get a newbie going?
- From: "djmpark" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:11:48 -0400 (EDT)
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A subject that greatly interests me. Many Mathematica users are simply interested in using Mathematica as a kind of super graphical calculator to obtain some numbers and a plot, or perhaps a dynamic Manipulate output; others see it as a programming language in which they write extended code for some problems and perhaps again obtain some numbers and plots. I see Mathematica more as a platform for creating a longer term knowledge base and capability in some technical area. Doing it correctly produces material that will have long term value for yourself and might well be very useful to other people. If you spend a lot of time at it, it's the fruit of your labor. Getting off on the right foot will help you to more quickly produce useful material. I'm not going to go into great detail in everything because this will be long enough as it is. Suppose you have a major field of interest, say BeamEngineering. There is a single good place to put your work. Evaluate $UseBaseDirectory (or possibly $BaseDirectory) in Mathematica. This will give you the location of your private Mathematica folders. There you will find a folder called Applications. In the Applications folder create a BeamEngineering folder. This is THE place to put all your work on that subject. You can have a folder structure inside of BeamEngineering. You might have folders for developmental notebooks and folders for relatively finished notebooks. You might include files other than Mathematica notebooks. As you accumulate useful routines that you may have developed along the way, you can add package files to the BeamEngineering folder (i.e., Application). At some point you might develop style sheets and palettes that go with your Application. You simply add a FrontEnd/StyleSheets and Palettes folders and put them there. You might add a Kernel/init.m file to contain initialization statements when the Application is loaded. Even later you might use Workbench to add Mathematica style Documentation to the Application. The reason this is a good place for your work is: 1) It is all together and not scattered all over your computer; 2) It is outside the WRI folders and not lost or hidden when you update Mathematica; 3) Mathematica automatically looks at that location for packages, documentation, style sheets and palettes. It just works smoothly. If you want to transmit your Application to someone else you can zip it (and maybe delete certain folders) and they just unzip into their private Mathematica/Applications folder and it will work right off. (It is shocking that many users fall into convoluted and difficult to use schemes when they don't follow this standard form.) My paradigm for a Mathematica notebook is a piece of paper on which I'm trying to write a literate technical document. I use a Title and Sectional groupings. I use Text cells to explain the material, just as one would in a technical paper. I generally have a Routines section (Package Purgatory) near the top where I place routines that have been developed but not yet placed in a package. I have a style sheet that looks more like a paper. (Section heads and Output cells are unadorned. Text font size and Output font size are the same. The range of font sizes is less than WRI uses. There are openers on the various section headings but not Input/Output groupings.) If I find a need for a new routine I will develop it in a main Section of the notebook, often with a number of tries, and then transfer it to the Routines section where I will make it an initialization cell. I will always write a usage message for the routine, SyntaxInformation, and Attributes and Options definitions when appropriate. The routine will be ready to transfer to a package after a bit of testing and usage. As for learning Mathematica, I wouldn't buy too many books. They tend to be out of date and cannot illustrate dynamics very well. Also, with books, one just tends to copy other peoples` special interest code. WRI supplies plenty of documentation and tutorials that you can work with. Study them, especially the functional programming commands. Then take SIMPLE non-Mathematica books or material in your field and try to "fly solo" with Mathematica. This is much better learning. David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/index.html From: d_j_fennell at yahoo.com [mailto:d_j_fennell at yahoo.com] Hello, I'm a brand new Mathematica user. I'm trying to get up to speed in Mathematica to set up workbooks for engineering problems. I've been using pad and paper to calculate beam stresses and deflections and to solve a variety of other engineering calcs for many years. Time to update my methods. Anyhow, I'm impressed with Mathematica's documentation. That said, I wish I could locate some fully worked out sample problems/workbooks. Mathematica has a huge library of awesome demostration projects, but it appears that the meat and potoes code of these demonstrations is not provided. It seems as if the only code available to view is in the "Maniupulate" section of the demonstration workbooks. I haven't downloaded a demonstration workbook yet that shows any code in the "Initialization" section. The code that I can see tends to be specific to the cool user front-end. Right now, I'm trying to pick up best practices for more mundane coding process. I suspect the code that I really want to be looking at right now is usually located in the Initialization area of the demos, which seem to be mostly blank. Am I looking in the wrong place? Is all the the code in every demo available to be seen or is much of the underlying "meat and potaties" work of the demo files typically remove d/hidden by the authors or Wolfram? I'd like to better understand how power users document their work, choose symbol names, format their workbooks, and choose amongst the various ways of getting things done. Looking at power users' VBA code for excel proved extremely helpful when I was trying to pick up some wherewithall in that area. I suspect that my ability to use Mathematica effectively will be greatly enhanced by following a similar process reviewing Mathematica code. (I have ordered some texts, but still waiting on delivery.) In the meantime, if anybody could point me towards a source of sample workbooks with all code available for view - I would much appreciate the help. Workbooks related to mechanical engineering problems would be awesome - but any mathematical problem solved with Mathematica would prove helpful to meat this point. Thanks!