On 2009-06-27 07:58, Paul Rubin wrote:
Albert van der Horst<alb...@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> writes:
Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson,
Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein.
Thanks. I lost that title a while ago, must buy.
Wait a few months, a third edition is in the works.
Also "Numerical Recipe's in FORTRAN/Pascal/C"
(Have they done Python yet?)
They haven't done Python AFAIK. I liked the C version but the
licensing of the software is pretty evil and so I'm a bit turned off
to the series these days. I think the hardcore numerics crowd never
liked the book anyway.
My opinion is that the text itself is a pretty good introduction to the workings
of a broad variety of numerical algorithms. For any particular area, there are
probably better books that go into more depth and are closer to the state of the
art, but I don't think there are any books that cover the wide swath numerical
algorithms that NR does. In that regard, I treat it like Wikipedia: a good place
to start, not the best place to stop.
I think the code succeeds reasonably well for teaching the algorithms, but I
don't think they are well-engineered for production use. There are usually
better libraries with better licenses.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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