Mathematica Cookbook: Building Blocks for Science, Engineering, Finance, Music, and More (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

The title suggests that the reader is already acquainted with handling the ingredients: the core programming language plus one of its five possible programming styles. Procedural programming, functional programming, rule-based programming, object-oriented programming, or recursive programming. When you then work on a larger program and get stuck because you forgot about the details of an implementional task, then reaching for a ready-to-use recipe from a cookbook should solve your task? Yes! Nice idea. The book offers hundreds of fine recipes, always in the typical Mathematica one-liner program format and all classified into easy-identifiable subject areas. So the problem is not finding out whether the book covers the implementional task or on which exact page to locate it. You will very quickly figure it out - the book is perfectly organized this way, for this purpose. And once found, the interested programmer should be able to adopt the recipe's code or idea. No. The true problem with the book and its collection of recipes is ..etc.. Anyway. I welcome Mangano's work. In an indirect way it teaches a lot of wisdom on practical and every-day-use programming, even if the suggested codes not always represent the most efficient codification possible. In comparison, if efficiency and code perfectionism matters, another notable new book in this area (Programming with Mathematica 6.0/7.0, Mathematica As A Programming Language) is Leonid Shifrin's publication (googel, wiki) which, too, contains collections of 'Recipes' (in an effort to be fair and overly modest, he calls them simply 'examples'). Shifrin explains more the intermediate steps (typical one-liner programs) how to get to the final readycode, and in addition, presents several(!) alternative implementations (written in the same programming paradigm with a refined or optimized algorithm/idea, or written in one of the four other programming paradigms) of the same 'Recipe' which are much more efficient and thus, suitable to RL large-scale applications. Shifrin starts where Mangano stops! Depending on your level of programming expertise the one book or the other suits your needs better, so check them out both :) I highly recommend Mangano's book, and even higher Leonid Shifrin book. Mathematica Cookbook helps you master the application's core principles by walking you through real-world problems. Ideal for browsing, this book includes recipes for working with numerics, data structures, algebraic equations, calculus, and statistics. You'll also venture into exotic territory with recipes for data visualization using 2D and 3D graphic tools, image processing, and music. Although Mathematica 7 is a highly advanced computational platform, the recipes in this book make it accessible to everyone -- whether you're working on high school algebra, simple graphs, PhD-level computation, financial analysis, or advanced engineering models. Learn how to use Mathematica at a higher level with functional programming and pattern matching. Delve into the rich library of functions for string and structured text manipulation. Learn how to apply the tools to physics and engineering problems. Draw on Mathematica's access to physics, chemistry, and biology data. Get techniques for solving equations in computational finance. Learn how to use Mathematica for sophisticated image processing. Process music and audio as musical notes, analog waveforms, or digital sound samples? Numerics Functional programming Data structures Patterns and rule-based programming String and text processing Two-dimensional graphics and plots Three-dimensional plots and graphics Image processing Audio and music processing Algebra Calculus: continuous and discrete Statistics and data analysis Science and engineering Financial engineering Interactivity Parallel mathematica Interfacing mathematica Tricks of the trade Debugging and testing.