The Mathematica book : [the definitive best-selling presentation of Mathematica by the creator of the system

As both a highly readable tutorial and a definitive reference for over a million Mathematica users worldwide, this book covers every aspect of Mathematica. It is an essential resource for all users of Mathematica from beginners to experts. This expanded fifth edition presents Mathematica Version 5 for the first time and is important for anyone interested in the progress of advanced computing. Included in this new edition are the following: - Visual tour of key features - Practical tutorial introduction - Full descriptions of 1,200+ built-in functions - Thousands of illustrative examples - Easy-to-follow descriptive tables - Essays highlighting key concepts - Mathematica language tutorial - Guide to symbolic programming - Introduction to document-centered interfaces - Guide to the MathLink API - Notes on internal implementation - Index with 10,000+ entries This book is intended to be a complete introduction to Mathematica. It describes essentially all the capabilities of Mathematica, assuming no prior knowledge of the system. Mathematica is a system build on a fairly small set of very powerful principles. This book describes those principles, but by no means spells out all of their implications. This book describes the standard Mathematica kernel, as it exists on all computers that run Mathematica. Most major supported features of the kernel in Mathematica Version 5 are covered in this book. Many important features of the front end are also discussed. This book describes what readers should do when interacting directly with the standard Mathematica kernel and notebook front end. Mathematica is an open software system that can be customized in a wide variety of ways. It is important to realize that this book covers only the full basic Mathematica system. If the system readers are using has been customized in any way, then Mathematica may behave differently from what is described in this book Mathematica has defined the state of the art in technical computing for nearly a decade, and has become a standard in many of the world's leading companies and universities. From simple calculator operations to large-scale programming and interactive document preparation, Mathematica is the tool of choice at the frontiers of scientific research, in engineering analysis and modeling, in technical education from high school to graduate school, and wherever quantitative methods are used. Mathematica has defined the state of the art in technical computing for over a decade, and has become a standard in many of the world's leading companies and universities. From simple calculator operations to large-scale programming and the preparation of interactive documents, Mathematica is the tool of choice.