"Essentiala welcome addition to the literature. The choice of topics and their presentation are lucidly informed by considerable experience. The writing style is straightforward and clear. The authors stick resolutely to their goal of producing an introductory text, not a complete treatment, on programming in Mathematica. As such it is highly successful, full of useful examples that show how the ideas can be immediately and fruitfully exploited."
The Mathematica Journal
"The two introductory chapters on the Mathematica language provide a wonderful, and very clear, introduction to use on the beginners levelThe chapter introducing the language does a masterful job of covering many of the most important features in just 21 pages, truly remarkable given the breadth and depth of the languagePart of the value here is that the authors do not merely provide a few sample programs, but actually take the time to detail the value of writing your own. Once the novice becomes familiar with the basic concepts, tests of understanding are provided by chapter exercises."
Scientific Computing
"Familiar with Mathematica this would be an excellent self study text to improve their understanding of how to use its considerable range of programming toolsAlso there are exercises and solutions as well as a couple of useful appendices on how Mathematica performs its calculations and debugging. It would thus seem an excellent course text."
S French, Journal of the Operational Research Society
Customer Reviews & Comments
This book is an excellent introduction to Mathematica. It is based on Mathematica 5.1 and hence bring the 2nd Ed. based on Mathematica 2.2 up to date to the most recent version of this software package. The book covers all aspects of programming functionalities available in Mathematica: procedural, functional, recursive, rule-based, and object-oriented. There are ample examples in science and mathematics as well as devising one's own software packages. The emphasis of the book is on the fundamental programming concepts. While there are examples of complete packages that solve specific problems more emphasis in this direction would even further strengthen the book.