The Mathematica Guidebook: Graphics at Dominant Systems Book Store

From the reviews:

"Through an abundance of examples, this volume teaches the reader how to use Mathematica to visualize functions and data, manipulate graphics, and optimize their appearance. … the graphics GuideBook confronts you with a huge collection of 2D graphics, contour plots, plots of surfaces, free-form 3D surfaces, and animations. Hundreds of detailed examples and programs … illustrate visualization techniques, methods, and algorithms." (Willy Hereman, SIAM Review, Vol. 47 (4), 2005)

Customer Reviews & Comments
It is unfortunate that two recent Amazon reviewers have found it difficult to understand the programming style in this book. I am a retired mathematician, now an antiquarian bookseller. Over the last 14 months, I have been reading all four books in the GuideBooks set and am preparing detailed written reviews on their content for publication elsewhere. The Graphics volume, like volumes 3 and 4, assumes that the reader has read the first volume, Programming, the full text of which is available with this volume. Indeed, this is explicitly stated in Section 0.1.2 of the Introduction: "The four volumes of the GuideBooks are basically independent, in the sense that readers familiar with Mathematica programming can read any of the other three volumes. But a solid working knowledge of the main topics discussed in The Mathematica GuideBook to Programming -- symbolic expressions, pure functions, rules and replacements, list manipulations -- is required for the Graphics, Numerics, and Symbolics volumes. ... The whole suite of graphical capabilities and all of the mathematical knowledge in Mathematica are accessed and applied through lists, patterns, rules, and pure functions, the material discussed in the Programming volume." Mathematica's pure functional notation and nonprocedural programming and symbolic pattern-matching can appear quite cryptic, being difficult to understand without the detailed background provided in the Programming volume. This is not to slight the ability of people who have been programming in Mathematica for many years, for one can write procedural, pure function [nonprocedural], or object-oriented programs in this robust system. Fortunately, the Graphics volume comes with a DVD that includes the complete text of all four volumes in the 5029-page GuideBooks series, including an index and hyperlinks to references and material found in the other volumes. Once one has read the needed chapters of the Programming volume, reading and understanding the programs in this outstanding Graphics volume is quite straightforward.

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