Product Description

Do you want easy access to the latest methods in scientific computing? This greatly expanded third edition of Numerical Recipes has it, with wider coverage than ever before, many new, expanded and updated sections, and two completely new chapters. The executable C++ code, now printed in colour for easy reading, adopts an object-oriented style particularly suited to scientific applications. Co-authored by four leading scientists from academia and industry, Numerical Recipes starts with basic mathematics and computer science and proceeds to complete, working routines. The whole book is presented in the informal, easy-to-read style that made earlier editions so popular. Highlights of the new material include: a new chapter on classification and inference, Gaussian mixture models, HMMs, hierarchical clustering, and SVMs; a new chapter on computational geometry, covering KD trees, quad- and octrees, Delaunay triangulation, and algorithms for lines, polygons, triangles, and spheres; interior point methods for linear programming; MCMC; an expanded treatment of ODEs with completely new routines; and many new statistical distributions. For support, or to subscribe to an online version, please visit www.nr.com.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114337 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1256 pages

Review
‘This monumental and classic work is beautifully produced and of literary as well as mathematical quality. It is an essential component of any serious scientific or engineering library.’ Computing Reviews

‘… an instant ‘classic,’ a book that should be purchased and read by anyone who uses numerical methods …’ American Journal of Physics

‘… replete with the standard spectrum of mathematically pretreated and coded/numerical routines for linear equations, matrices and arrays, curves, splines, polynomials, functions, roots, series, integrals, eigenvectors, FFT and other transforms, distributions, statistics, and on to ODE's and PDE's … delightful.’ Physics in Canada

‘… if you were to have only a single book on numerical methods, this is the one I would recommend.’ EEE Computational Science & Engineering

‘This encyclopedic book should be read (or at least owned) not only by those who must roll their own numerical methods, but by all who must use prepackaged programs.’ New Scientist

‘These books are a must for anyone doing scientific computing.’ Journal of the American Chemical Society

‘The authors are to be congratulated for providing the scientific community with a valuable resource.’ The Scientist

'I think this is an incredibly valuable book for both learning and reference and I recommend it for any scientists or student in a numerate discipline who need to understand and/or program numerical algorithms.' International Association for Pattern Recognition

'The attractive style of the text and the availability of the codes ensured the popularity of the previous editions and also recommended this recent volume to different categories of readers, more or less experienced in numerical computation.' Octavian Pastravanu, Zentralblatt MATH

About the Author
William H. Press holds the Raymer Chair in Computer Sciences and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Saul A. Teukolsky is H. A. Bethe Professor in Physics in the Radiophysics and Space Research Department of Cornell University.

William Vetterling is a Research Fellow and Director of the Image Science Laboratory at ZINK Imaging, LLC in Waltham, MA. His career includes eight years on the physics faculty at Harvard and 20 years of numerical modeling and laboratory research on digital imaging at Polaroid Corporation.

Brian P. Flannery is Science, Strategy and Programs Manager at Exxon Mobil Corporation.

Customer Reviews

Good not great
This book is collection of 15 years work and is widely used and highly respected in scientific computing. It seems churlish to criticize it.
However, Numerical Recipes is not without its faults. In my experience (optimisation, MCMC sampling) the algorithms given do not adequately represent the ones available in the field. There is only one global optimiser (simulated annealing), no non-linear contrained optimisers and no mention of slice sampling for instance. This incompleteness would be helped by including a wide ranging bibliography for each group of algorithms. However, I found the references quite limited.
The book describes itself as a cookbook for cooks. Although this is a worthy aim, it cannot compare to reading the original papers or reviews of algorithms available in journals. In essence, this further reading is what someone needs to do in order to alter an algorithm for their own needs.
The shortcomings could be forgiven if the book provided a way of getting something , relatively simple, working quite quickly. However, you have to type the code in yourself or pay extra to get it in electronic form. Using either of these methods, the licencing terms are restrictive and are for personal use only. This made the book an expensive disappointment for me, especially since free alternatives like the GNU scientific library exist.
On the plus side the descriptions of the available algorithms are excellent given the limited space available to describe them. The authors also include tips based on their experience and mention why a particular algorithm may be more popular despite being no better than some of the others. To my knowledge, Numerical Recipes has no decent competition when it comes to the description of algorithms.

On the whole still a good buy
Some months' hesitation preceded my review of this book. When a book in its third edition reaches over a thousand pages, anyone may reasonably expect the balance to have drifted off a little. I therefore agree with the reviewer who criticises the omission of certain topics in optimisation and suspect that this indicates that a fourth edition might be a step too far.

On the other hand the criticism that you have to transcribe the source code examples manually IMO is a little ill-considered, if only because most code examples in most similar books need a lot of revision to attain the kind of code quailty required for high-integrity applications. Nor do I think it a demerit to refer to external material. Indeed, I would feel let down if such a book did not contain such references - and the ones that are given are IMO very well chosen both for breadth and focus.

One last (and perhaps churlish) niggle: As a software engineer I am irritated by the slowness of mathematicians to abandon use of "goto" statements, but this is arguably among the least of the books failings.

Apart from that this book covers a very wide range of topics and on the whole does what it sets out to do pretty well. It may not give you the answers you are looking for but it is an excellent starting point for deeper investigation in every area that it does cover. IMO serious users of numerical methods should have this edition on their bookshelves.

Too dependent on external material
I am an old user of Numerical Recipes and, in particular, of the C version (2nd edition). This third edition has for sure expanded its scope (and this is good). However, far too much is not self-contained, and depends on external material in electronic form. We are in the Internet era, but this does not mean a book should not *fully* stand up by itself!