Numerical Recipes in C

by William T. Vetterling, Brian P. Flannery, William H. Press, et al.

Book Overview

This new edition contains the latest versions of the routines but written in the C programming language. The book covers scientific applications, dynamic memory allocation, modularization, pointer references to matrices, structured programming and other topics and has an accompanying diskette.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052135465X
• ISBN13: 9780521354653
• Release Date: February 1988
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 768 Pages
• Weight: 2.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

simply the best

excellent book! yes, the code is C and ugly C at that; yes, it's old fashioned and probably FORTRAN-like; and, yes, more often than not, I find myself editing the code to bring it to C++ level. however, it's not really the point of the book, is it?make no mistake, this IS the book of recipes. in an unlikely event a reader needs to go beyond the level of sophistication of the book, he or she will be likely to understand what's going on. the opposite is true more often: you need a quick solution to get some insight into the problem, and the book gives you what you need and more. the authors really knew what they were doing, because in the situation where quick means bad they give their reader a high quality solution (case in point: random number generators). and though you can read the book online, having one on your table is very useful too. the best book you can get on the subject!!! highly recommended.

Most useful book on my bookshelf

I'm a graduate student in biochemistry who frequently needs to solve numerical problems (FFT, least squares curve fitting, optimization, random number generation, eigensystems, etc.), and I can honestly say this is the most useful book on my bookshelf.The code is simple enough to customize for your particular problem, and powerful enough to handle problems orders of magnitude larger than you could do in Matlab, Mathematica, or Excel.The explanations are wonderfully clear, and even fun to read! They give you concise descriptions of theory, followed by a good dose of practical advice and editorializing.

Code IS compliant with ANSI and IS in ASCII format

The code you purchase separately IS definitely in ASCII format. For the Windows version, the authors have provided a "browser" (yes, some kind of .dll file) that allows you to look at individual routines before saving them to your disk. This method is much easier than just dumping 400-500 routines (including example driver programs) to your hard disk. As the authors point out in the help file, there are numerous routines where they WANT you to change things (e.g., platform-dependent definitions of machine epsilon), or at least inspect, for your application. The idea that the code would not be provided in a format that can be edited is completely at odds with what the authors talk about in the Preface (1st ed.), as well as other places in the book. You're SUPPOSED to tear it apart and put it back together. If the above-referenced reviewer's diskettes really do not have the ability to extract ASCII files, like mine, then they are surely defective.Second, the code IS ANSI-C compliant, which is stated quite clearly in the book. The fact that it is different for different platforms probably (I'm guessing) has to do with the unwrapping program used to navigate through the source files. The Windows browsing file mentioned above is really just a clever application of the standard Windows ".hlp" file format. Obviously, you can't use that on Mac or UNIX. I saw yet another way to do it on DOS platforms with the first edition diskettes. There is no reason to suspect that the actual code is not IDENTICAL on all platforms, except, of course, that each platform defines a newline differently. That said, it is a clear violation of the user license to be porting the code between platforms.Now, if anyone cares about my opinion of the book... I am not a numerical analyst by trade. I'm just an engineer who finds myself doing numerical analysis sometimes. If this description fits you, or you are a graduate student doing engineering/physics (especially experimental work) that sometimes requires numerical analysis, then this may be the only book you need. It is DEFINITELY the first book you should BUY. Yes, you get all the source code in the book and that's great. But, you get an outstanding introduction, all in one place, to techniques of numerical analysis for all different kinds of applications. It is not a text book, so you don't have to waste the first three chapters proving a bunch of junk about converging series and Rolle's theorem and blah blah blah. (Blah blah blah gives you insight, no doubt. Far be it from me to trash the academic approach. I'm just sayin' that sometimes people in the real world have deadlines with large sums of money at stake and they have to take their best shot with or without the right background.)I signed up for, and promptly dropped, a numerical analysis course on three different occasions during my graduate career. It was just too boring. This book is fun, and usually gives me enough background to get going on a p

good book, bad policy

This is a very useful book for scientists and engineers, it collects codes for many most-often-encountered numerical problems, and the discussion is lucid, frank and helpful. However, the author adopted a very bad policy: they do not permit users to distribute their code. So suppose you write an application program which uses lots of integrations, linear algebra and differential equation routines, you would naturally like to use the numerical recipe routines for these basic tasks, but if you want to make your code freely available to others, you find you can't, because the numerical recipes routines are copyrighted and the authors forbid you to distribute even part of them with your code(except for a few public domain routines). They suggest you use the Netlib code which is freely available, however, since there is no systematic documentation, it is more difficult to use the netlib code. In any case, what is the point of having this book and its code if you have to use netlib code? this is really a trouble for the readers and users of this book. On the other hand, the authors provided their book online free of charge, but this is of little use--most readers would buy the book anyway, and prefer to have the code free.