Getting Started with Mathematica

by Chi Keung Cheung, Charles Landraitis, G.E. Keough

Book Overview

Mathematica is computer software that performs abstract computation as well as numerical computation. It can produce graphics ranging from graphs of functions in the plane to intricate, three-dimensional plots of surfaces and parametric curves. It also provides support for programming. This guide gives a stream-lined, but fairly extensive introduction to Mathematica. It primarily covers Mathematica 5.0, although references to earlier versions are...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471478156
• ISBN13: 9780471478157
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 231 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.9" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

Good, and small enough to hold comfortably, too.

I like and recommend this general introduction to Mathematica (MMA) and am almost halfway through. Getting Started with Mathematica is much smaller than The Mathematica Book, or Mathematica Navigator, or the 4 volume Mathematica GuideBook series, and is the only general Mathematica book I've found that's small enough to hold comfortably. Clearly, they made some choices to keep the book small. For example, MMA has a bewildering wealth of ways to type expressions in the graphically complicated mathematical notation you'd see on a blackboard, with Greek letters, subscripts and superscripts, fractions many layers high, and symbols that aren't on the keyboard. Other than brief mention of palettes where you can click on some characters, they let all of this go, along with the several MMA ways of representing them from the keyboard. For this level of detail you need one of the 5 pound books. To be very picky, here are some things I didn't like. There are different ways of packaging information in this book. For example, there's a Useful Tips section near the end of every chapter. The tip saying that natural logs are written "Log[]" rather than "Ln[]" rates 3 stars, and the more useful tip not to use spaces to show multiplication only ranked 1 star. Then there are Troubleshooting Q & A sections, after the Tips. Why are some things offered in the body of the chapter, some as tips, and some in question-and-answer form? This scatters things unnecessarily. For example, Mathematica's built-in names always start with a capital letter, so it's a good idea for users to start the names they define with a lowercase letter. But in the "Rules for Names" section, they don't mention this, and in fact offer "Perimeter" and "Batman" as "examples of legitimate names that you could use". Starting with lowercase only turns up 4 pages later as a Useful Tip. "Immediate assignment" and "delayed assignment" are explained in a Troubleshooting Q & A section. "The difference between them is about when the expression on the right side of the assignment gets evaluated. Our rules of thumb are: use immediate assignment '=' when you give a name to an expression or result. Use delayed assignment ':=' when you define a function." I gather that immediate assignment evaluates the thing being assigned once, when the line is processed, while delayed assignment evaluates it afresh every time the assignee is evaluated. Their "rules of thumb" just obscure this. Things are sometimes introduced out of order. For example, we learn to assign Solve's answer to a rootfinding problem to "ans", and then isolate each of the two roots as "ans[[1]]" and "ans[[2]]", which is new unexplained notation. Two pages later, a Useful Tip says that the purpose of [[ double square brackets ]] notation is to "Specify by position". Only in the next chapter do we learn about lists (MMA's form of vectors, arrays, and the like) and find that double brackets are notation for indexing into them. Now for some things

Getting Started with Mathematics

An excellent small book to work with when trying to learn how to use Mathematica. I found it very easy to follow and I particularly liked the progression from easy topics to more advanced topics. The examples that are used to demonstrate the Mathematica approach have been well chosen. It is so easy to play around with these examples to really see what is going on. I am very pleased that the graphics functions are interspersed with the other commands. This really helps to see what is going on, as well, it also acts as appropriate repetition for learning the Mathematica syntax. Not only that, the mathematics being used as a context for the examples simply comes alive as well. So I felt that I was getting more from this book than just how to use Mathematica. One small point that may be of use. Mathematica version 6 has changed a number of the commands, particularly for graphics. Although it is still possible to complete the examples it is necessary to do a bit of detective work first. But that just helps with the learning, so not a big deal.

Best beginner's book in Mathematica...

I got the 1998 printing of this book, which treats Mathematica 3., but not 4.+. So some of the formatting for the commands is not quite right, but a 4.+ user can use the Help Browser in Mathematica to correct for these.This book is written at a freshman/sophomore level, and includes enough basics to be useful for a Calc I through Calc 3 student, Linear Algebra student, and Intro Statistics student. Some of the 3D plots are truly beautiful, such as the hyperboloid in one sheet. These authors have a full grasp of parameterization, which is necessary for some plots (e.g., the hyperboloid in one sheet).So--a great intro, with more content than other intro Mathematica books.

A must for mathematica beginners!

This book helped me a lot getting started with mathematica . It gives easy examples in all basic math areas. The examples can easily be reproduced and modified for personal use. The only critique is that there is no disk included...everything needs to be punched in.