The Mathematica (R) Book, Version 4

by Stephen Wolfram

Book Overview

With over a million users around the world, the Mathematica software system created by Stephen Wolfram has defined the direction of technical computing for the past decade. The enhanced text and hypertext processing and state-of-the-art numerical computation features ensure that Mathematica 4 takes scientific computing into the next century. New to this version: visual tour of key features, practical tutorial introduction, full descriptions of 1100...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521643147
• ISBN13: 9780521643146
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 1496 Pages
• Weight: 6.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.9" x 8.6" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

The reference, not the tutorial

There's a lot of power in Mathematica, as a symbolic algebra system, as super-powered calculator, for basic graphics, and even for limited kinds of text preparation. This puts essentially all of that power in your hands.You had better have strong hands. This is as thick as most two books on my shelf. That's what it takes, though, to describe something as featureful as Mathematica. Just about any function you ever heard of, it has. It also has the derivative and integral, in symbolic form, and maybe even a moment generating function, if that applies. It's all there and it's indexed fairly well.That won't help the beginner struggling with the basic syntax or programming model. The pattern matching is not at all intuitive, if you've been programming in procedural or OO languages - a Prolog background would serve you better. Combinations of code, formatted text, and graphics are also possible, but no always easy to work out from this text. This is not a primer, it's an encyclopedia.That's what I want, though: the language, the library, and an organization that doesn't hide them. It's not a user-friendly introduction, but I'm not a very friendly user.

the definitive guide to the Mathematica software

I bought the 2nd edition of this book back in the early 90s when a student edition of the software was available to me inexpensively for the Mac. The book was very helpful in learning how to use the Mathematica program. There are examples galore and many graphical illustrations. As other reviewers have said, the whole book comes online with the software and you can easily search it, but I liked having an offline copy too. The later versions are just extensions of earlier ones.It is easy to learn how to do simple examples from the book. Suppose you want to plot the expression |x-y| + |x| + |y|. On page ix, before the book really begins, there is an example of the syntax to make a plot: Plot3D[ Sin[x y], {x,0,Pi}, {y,0,Pi} ]. In chapter 1 (p. 49) you learn that the absolute value is given by the Abs[x] function. So, you can type Plot3D[ Abs[x-y] + Abs[x] + Abs[y], {x,-2,2}, {y,-2,2}] to get a nice 3D plot of this expression, with x and y in the range -2 to 2. If you want to see a plot where the value of the expression is Plot3D[ Abs[x-y] + Abs[x] + Abs[y], {x,-2,2}, {y,-2,2}, PlotRange->{0,2} ].

For the generally curious - Mathematica!

I have been a Mathematica user for many years, back when you could get it for just the MAC, and a big fan of Steven Wolfram. If you are like me, you're just a bit curious to see what the 4,832th digit for Pi is, using N[Pi,4832]. Or what a Contour graph looks like, right! Well, this book will definately show you how to do it! This latest hardcover book, which includes reference for version 4.1 of Mathematica, is a add-on of the same(only smaller) book on version 3.0 of Mathematica. There are much more examples specific to version 4.x and also the book is a few hundred pages more than the v3 book. If you have the v3.0 book and dont use the v4.x software, there really is no need to get this book, unless you're really curious about what v4.x offers and like to lug around a 6 pound book! The graphics are very vivid, sharp and basically the same ones in v3.0. Due to some of the new graphing features in v4.x, there are samples of these as well. Overall, a great software reference to one of the best software packages ever made!

THE Referrence Book to Mathematica

This is the most complete reference book for the Mathematica system. However, be aware of the fact that it doesn't treat any topic in great detail (for instance, it doesn't provide a single example of a complete Mathematica program). There are many texts available for specific purposes, but this is the one that gives you the broad picture (version 3.0 comes with the Mathematica Book on line, but studying something from the screen can be a bit annoying).