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(11 reviews)
Author: Paul Wellin
ISBN : 1107009464
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Format: PDF
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Book Description
This practical, example-driven introduction is designed for Mathematica users, new and accomplished, who wish to learn the foundations of the Mathematica programming language in order to apply it to the task of solving concrete problems in science, engineering, economics and finance, computational linguistics, geoscience, bioinformatics and so on.
About the Author
Paul Wellin worked for Wolfram Research from the mid 1990s through 2011 directing the Mathematica training efforts with the Wolfram Education Group. He has taught mathematics at both public schools and at the university level for over 12 years. He has given talks, workshops and seminars around the world on the integration of technical computing and education and he has served on numerous government advisory panels on these issues. He is the author of several books on Mathematica.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Free Programming with Mathematica®: An Introduction
- Hardcover: 728 pages
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 25, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1107009464
- ISBN-13: 978-1107009462
- Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.1 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
Free Programming with Mathematica®: An Introduction
This book is quite nice and it was written in Mathematica itself, so this already provides an idea of how much one can do with Mathematica. Chapter 1 begins with a tour of some of the main capabilities using eye-catching examples (there are plenty of eye-catching examples throughout the text), which was exactly what I needed to get started. However, as I went deeper, I found that the book is mostly about the Mathematica language -- its structures, lists, rules, expressions, functions, etc. -- and less about "how to do math with Mathematica", which was perhaps what I was looking for.
Nevertheless, I kept reading and actually trying out many of the examples. The author uses Mac OS, but is sufficiently careful to point out differences to other OSes whenever appropriate (I used Mathematica both in Windows and Linux, the only issue that I found was that the sound routines in Section 10.3 do not work on Linux).
Despite the focus on "programming with Mathematica" rather than "doing math with Mathematica", after reading this book I feel quite comfortable with the tool and its language. For example, I can browse through the documentation and immediately understand the syntax of all Mathematica functions and how to use them in my code.
The rich set of examples throughout the book also helps in this respect, but in some examples it would be useful to have more detailed explanations. The author is absolutely proficient with Mathematica, but the text explanations could be made more precise, especially when the examples become relatively complex.
This means that using this book for self-study can be challenging. I can imagine that it would be much easier if I would be attending classes and a teacher would walk me through through some of these examples.
This is an excellent place from which to start learning the programming language that is the core of Mathematica (btw, the language is about to be released as a stand-alone app to be called the Wolfram Language). Placing the chapters on rules and patterns before functional programming and after the chapter on lists in this new version of a classic book is an excellent choice. As the first co-author of the first two versions of this book (1993, 1996) and the second co-author of the third version (2005), i wrote the chapters on List Manipulation, Functions, Evaluation of Expressions (and possibly also the chapter on Conditional Function Definitions although i don't recall that with certainty).
note: the writing of the chapters in these earlier versions of the book was divided up amongst the three co-authors who independently wrote their chapters, each of which was then reviewed by the other co-authors (though admittedly, i never read any of the chapters written by my co-authors) who suggested changes that might be made by the chapter's author.
Being a theoretical soft matter physicist with no prior training in programming languages (other than being a self-taught programmer in APL with some working knowledge of standard ML), i was under the impression at the time of the writing of the earlier book versions, that programs written in the Mathematica programming language were most efficient and more elegant when written in the functional programming style rather than in the procedural programming style.