Average Customer Review:  
| A Useful Tool, but Know its Limitations | |
Numerical Recipes is the perfect book for a programmer who took the required math classes and has since forgotten much of the material. Here you will encounter brief, theoretical discussions about how to solve common numerical problems, followed by implementations in C, and finished off with a few suggestions for further reading.I've actually found the explanations about how to solve problems more useful than the code they provide. Their C coding style seems to harken back to FORTRAN days. I've also translated from C to MatLab and IDL in some instances (on one occasion, translating the MatLab routine back to C a few years later!) Elsewhere on the net, mathematical critiques can be found. If you're trying to solve a critical problem, hunt these down. It bothered me to find vectors referenced from 1 to n as opposed to 0 to n-1, the way I'm used to seeing them in C code. But, for practical use, this book is difficult to beat. It makes, at the very least, a great starting point, especially for those of us who last took a math class 18 years ago and find the details foggy. Kind of like The Joy of Cooking. A good, basic reference to keep around, but not the final word on gourmet programming.
| Software ASCII source on CD-ROM and other software | |
Contrary to another review, the source code in ASCII text is available on the CD-ROM, but one needs a Windows platform to unpack it.I was able to compile the small set of software I tried in MS VC++ 6.0. Its arrays are 1-based, and it uses mostly floats instead of doubles. I saw no comments in the code; I got the impression that helps to sell the book. The code also makes heavy use of preprocessor macros. Those who want better code should refer to the Guide to Available Mathematical Software (GAMS) at http://gams.nist.gov/ GAMS-referenced software might be higher quality code, but this Numerical Recipes book is very valuable in understanding the algorithms, especially if you do not spend a large part of your professional life engrossed in their details. This book is much more understandable than the other texts on Numerical Algorithms I have read; it frequently is even enjoyable-- a rarity in such texts.
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