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 enlarge | Authors: William H. Press, Saul A. Teukolsky, William T. Vetterling, Brian P. Flannery
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $80.00
Buy New: $44.00
You Save: $36.00 (45%)
New (35) Used (17) from $44.00
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 12156
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 3
Pages: 1256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.5
Dimensions (in): 10.2 x 7.4 x 1.8
ISBN: 0521880688
Dewey Decimal Number: 518.0285
EAN: 9780521880688
Publication Date: September 10, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-7 of 7 | | « PREV | | |
 Contents improved, but codes not September 28, 2007
Jacky
38 out of 44 found this review helpful
I'm a fan of this book since I've been using this book for a very long time. I pre-ordered the new version and got it a week ago. I think the contents are improved after I had a look at it. I'm pretty happy about that. However, the quality of the source codes, well, I have to say it is getting worse. As you may notice, authors of N.R. put a stringent license on usage of their codes, which is fine since these codes are their intellectual properties. But since they are selling their codes, they are supposed to hire some professional programmers to design a beatiful architecture, a nice data structure, and an easy-to-use interface, and implement all the algorithms with efficiency. As I can tell, C++ is abused in the 3rd version in a very bad way. I've been developing scientific computing software using C/C++ over 10 years, and I have to say the authors of the codes organized their work in a weird way. In the previous version of their codes in C++, global variables are still defined and used at so many places. Any professional programmer knows how bad such a programming style is. In this version, instead of wrapping their routines in classes, they simply use "struct" to hold global variables, does this delight you? This is just an example which upsets me. The only good thing is that they finally learned to use template...
Valuable book, but not worth an upgrade June 28, 2008
K. Dixon
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Bottom line up front: Every computational scientist should own a copy of Numerical Recipes but, if you already own a previous version, then don't bother upgrading.
I already owned a copy of "Numerical Recipes in C, 2nd Edition" (from 1992), so I was absolutely thrilled when I saw that the book had been updated in over 15 years. This is why I was so underwhelmed with the 3rd edition. As a previous reviewer noted, the vast majority of the book is largely unchanged.
As in previous editions, the authors do a great job of providing codes that cover the spectrum of topics encountered by researchers. As in previous editions, the authors still take the "give a man a fish" instead of the "teach a man to fish" method. This might seem like a negative but, in my opinion, this is why every scientist should own a copy of Numerical Recipes. Often, topics pop up that need immediate solving and one can often find a code for the topic in Numerical Recipes. As in previous editions, Numerical Recipes is really just an annotated code repository, with very stringent/restrictive licensing rules by the way!
However, as the authors note in the introduction, they made a conscious decision to fill pages with verbatim codes, not building insight into various topics. In my experience, the codes given in Numerical Recipes get the job done, but these tend to be simple and less efficient than other well-known algorithms.
As in previous editions, Numerical Recipes is a terrible pedagogical text. If you're interesting in understanding a particular topic, then get a special-purpose book.
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