Book Description

This companion volume to Andy Zonst's Understanding the FFT is written in five parts, covering a range of topics from transient circuit analysis to two dimensional transforms.It's an introducton to some of the many applicatons of the FFT, and it's intended for anyone who wants to understand and explore this technology.

The presentation is unique in that it avoids the calculus almost (but not quite) completely.It's a practical "how-to" book, but it also provides down to earth understanding.

This book developes computer programs in BASIC and the reader is encouraged to type these into a computer and run them; however, for those who don't have access to a BASIC compiler you may down load the programs from the internet (contact Citrus Press for URL).

The potential buyer should understand that presentations are frequently started at an elementary level.This is just a technique to establish the foundation for the subsequent discussion, intended for those who don't already understand the subject (the material usually comes quickly to the problem at hand).The book is written in an informal, tutorial style, and should be managable by anyone with a solid background in high school algebra, trigonometry, and complex arithmetic.Zonst has included the mathematics that might not be available in a high-school curriculum; so, if you managed to work your way through the first book, you should be able to handle this one.

For those familiar with the first edition of this book, the most prominant feature of this revised edition will be its improved coherence and readability. ... Read more

Book Description

This text introduces the beginning computer science student to someof the fundamental ideas and techniques used by computer scientists today,focusing on discrete structures, logic and computability. The emphasis is on thecomputational aspects, so that the reader can see how the concepts are actuallyused. Because of logic's fundamental importance to computer science, the topicis examined extensively in three phases which cover: informal logic; thetechnique of inductive proof; and formal logic and its applications to computerscience. ... Read more

Reviews (5)

Second Review of Dr. Hein's Book
Now, since I took two terms of classes that used Dr. Hein's book, I had internal urges to write emails to Dr. Hein and praise him for his book and his lab manual (but I never did wrote to him, though). Instead, I decided to write to a broader audience, here at Amazon. I found the book ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, a Holistic Bible of Computer Logic so to speak, for every CS student. I have read and re-read the book and still reading it today, during the Summer Break. I scanned the whole book with a flatbed scanner because I needed to look things up often even as I studied other courses at Portland State University. I also highly recommend Dr. Hein's Prolog Lab Manual which guides you through the experiments designed to help understanding the Book's material. Marvelous Lab Manual, Dr. Hein! It is my opinion that Doctor Hein has a profound vision of where Computer Science is going and that's why he designed his Book and his lab manual this way. The Book and Lab Manual helped me tremendously to understand recursion and logic.
PS: I never write reviews of books, but this particular book have always prompted urges to praise it.

Excellent book!
This is an excellent book! Easy to read and understand. I am an "A" student, at Portland State University and I think that people who wrote bad reviewes of this book did not read the book (just like they might read every 50th page of any other book). Bill Gates once said that every person is born to be able to understand only up to a certain level of abstraction. Just like some of us are born to be able to lift 500 lbs. and some only 50 lbs. In addition, a person has to have some background to be able to understand more advanced topics. The book is most excellent.

This book is not very good.
This book makes a better door stop, than a academic text book. Having taken the classes at PSU I know this book front to back. The dosent really explain the subjects well, the book as a whole lacks focus. The first half of the book is horribly written, and abismal when actually compated to a discrete mathmatics, and/or group theory book. So much so there is a bit of a running joke about it in the math department. I would recomend to any CS student to avoid the text book and study from a regular math book instead.

A Good Text
I've taught from this text for 8 years. The excellent students have no problem with it. The average students complain that it is hard to understand. I don't think any text covering these topics could be easier to understand, actually.

There are plenty of examples in the text. However, the exercises tend to be significantly more complex than the examples. The answers to many exercises are in the back of the book, which is a great help to students.

Discrete math for real software engineers
Software designs must address trade-offs among factors such as performance, usability, completeness, timeliness, correctness and so on. Judging from the number of bugs people encounter, software engineers seem to be trading away too much of the correctness factor for something else.

Hein's text addresses this issue by placing much greater emphasis on ideas from logic and methods of proof than most other books on discrete mathematics, such as the popular text by Rosen. In addition, Hein includes material relating important software concepts to abstract algebra, and he does this without slighting other common topics of discrete mathematics, such as sets, relations, functions, counting, automata, and computability. Software engineers who have learned from Hein's text will have practical tools that they can use to deal with the software correctness factor more effectively.

Besides all of these good qualities, the text is well organized, clearly written, and punctuated with deligtfully subtle humor. I plan to use it. ... Read more

Book Description

This is a follow-on to Andy's first book - Understanding the FFT.It presents the fundamental mathematical notions underlying the DFT and FFT at essentially the same level as the first book.It goes on to illustrate applications of the FFT it instrumentation, audio and image enhancment (2-dimensional FFT), developing necessary peripheral techniques along the way. ... Read more

Book Description

Professional programmers and computer science students alike will appreciate this easy-to-use reference. It provides the vital foundation every computer scientist must have -- how to formulate an algorithm in some mathematical form.

To accomplish this, the author uses a layered approach with each successive chapter reinforcing the preceding chapters. Numerous exercises, graded by level of difficulty, are provided to fully convey the material.

A proven text for introductory computer science courses, the book includes sections on sets, functions, and relations; algebraic systems; and programming applications. ... Read more

Book Description

Now all the routines from the Numerical Recipes second edition plus all the test programs from the Numerical Recipes Example Book are available on one diskette. Diskettes are available in both C and FORTRAN for the IBM/PC or the Macintosh. These diskettes can save hours of tedious keyboarding, allowing readers to quickly and easily run the test programs and to adapt the recipes to their own needs. ... Read more

Reviews (33)

good book, bad policy
This is a very useful book for scientists and engineers, it collects codes for many most-often-encountered numerical problems, and the discussion is lucid, frank and helpful. However, the author adopted a very bad policy: they do not permit users to distribute their code. So suppose you write an application program which uses lots of integrations, linear algebra and differential equation routines, you would naturally like to use the numerical recipe routines for these basic tasks, but if you want to make your code freely available to others, you find you can't, because the numerical recipes routines are copyrighted and the authors forbid you to distribute even part of them with your code(except for a few public domain routines). They suggest you use the Netlib code which is freely available, however, since there is no systematic documentation, it is more difficult to use the netlib code. In any case, what is the point of having this book and its code if you have to use netlib code? this is really a trouble for the readers and users of this book. On the other hand, the authors provided their book online free of charge, but this is of little use--most readers would buy the book anyway, and prefer to have the code free.

Check GNU Scientific Library first
I give the book 4 stars to maintain the current level. I own a Fortran copy of NR, but like the other authors, I like NR for the explanations of algorithms, but not for the code.

There is a VERY good alternative to Numerical Recipes in C, namely GNU Scientific Library. You can find the source code and manual from:

http://sources.redhat.com/gsl/

or

http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl

As typical GNU software, GSL is licensed under GNU General Public License, so it is ABSOLUTELY free ! You can download it, modify it, linked it with your own code, without feeling guilty of copyright violation (Not in the case of NR, NR comes with a copyright license to prohibit modification and linking).

GSL is written in C from scratch by its author. The design is modern, much better than NR in C, and also allowed linking with C++ or modern scripting language like Python. Some of the leading authors have background in theoretical physics and astrophysics, just like NR authors.

Check it out. You lose nothing to check GSL first, you may ended up saving some $$$.

Excellent reference, but poor writing style and license
I had to endure reading this book for 2 long semesters, and I've come to know some parts of it pretty well. I'll try to be short and say that the book is an excellent reference for the practicioner (and for the poor student:) - however, the ill-placed "jokes" have terribly annoyed me and my fellow class mates. Entire pagagraphs in almost every section dedicated to some second-tier humor were not so helpful in solving numerical problems.

The license for the code is just bad and I found it rather pointless, given the cost of the book (for me it's expensive; and I know it's downloadable). The authors should maybe reconsider this at a later stage...

PS: The GNU Scientific Library implements most, if not all, of the NR routines. It might be worth checking out, since it's also in plain C.

Proprietary source the Achilles' heel for non-students
I first bought the FORTRAN version of this text in 1994 while doing scientific programming for graduate school work. I've been able to do a lot of basic research quickly with NR codes, and I still occasionally use NR's routines. The authors have certainly done a good job assimilating a lot of material in the NR series. Since other reviewers have done well to highlight the importance and utility of this landmark series, there is no need to repeat those sentiments here. I also agree with earlier reviewers applauding this title more as a survey or reference work and less as a library of source code. However, to this title's detriment, the authors actually consider the NR series to be a proprietary library of source code more valuable than the explanatory text surrounding it (one can in fact download the text on-line from the publisher though it's hardly worth the hassle). This perception is ironic since the authors confess that "the lineage of many programs in common circulation is often unclear," and many details of presentation, ideas, and algorithms are clearly "borrowed" from other excellent (some now out-of-print) numerical methods books or journals.

Unfortunately, much of the source code in the 1993 C edition appears FORTRANish and is not very efficient as far as the C language goes (one would hope that improvements are coming in the new C edition, ISBN 0521574382). However, even the original FORTRAN NR routines occasionally adopted bizarre and/or obviously inefficient programming structures - over time I decided that this was probably done to make these algorithms appear as so not to obviously plagerize other published material.

Many programmers try to get around this by reworking the NR codes. Apparently the authors consider modification of their sometimes inefficient code "derivative works" (even bug fixes) which cannot be legally redistributed or even used on more than one machine at a time without purchasing a new license or book. As a student, NR's legal disclaimers regarding derivative works never bothered me and I was willing to overlook the sometimes unpolished source code insofar as it functioned properly. But as a professional, I now find the lack of fair-use provisions on uncompiled, derivative source way too restrictive to rely on them in good conscience. I have since expanded my numerical methods library to other references supporting true public-domain codes. With an expanded basis of comparison, I regret to say that I am becoming less and less impressed with NR's implementations and explanations. I am finding some of NR's algorithms to be inefficient or unnecessarily approximate, and - on rare occasion - buggy. There have been quite a few bugs uncovered over the years, although the NR web site has done a good job of keeping track of them.

In closing, this book is excellent for students wanting a good reference for quick and dirty types of analyses or scientific computing. Professional programmers, scientists, engineers, specialists or analysts performing research would be well advised to reference this title, but ultimately they will likely need to rely other resources if they require efficient and/or unrestricted (public-domain) source codes for their work.

Useful for fourier optics simulations
I have completed numerous fourier transform algorithms (as well a FFT ones too) and this little book has been very helpful with most of its functions. I use it all the time to train my interns. Very good to get started... but beware that for advanced computing you might need a more complicated book. ... Read more

Book Description

This is a tutorial on the FFT algorithm (fast Fourier transform) including an introduction to the DFT (discrete Fourier transform).It is written for the non-specialist in this field.It concentrates on the actual software (programs written in BASIC) so that readers will be able to use this technology when they have finished.Aimed at working engineers, advanced technicians and students. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

I've been looking for a book like this for 10 years
This book contains all the necessary info to obtain a working knowledge of DFT and FFT. It contains many GWBASIC example programs so the reader can get a good grasp of what the algorithms are supposed to do. "C" progammers would have no difficulty rewitting these algorithms in "C".
Notes:
(1) most GWBASIC programs run without modification under QBASIC.
(2) the ones that don't run under QBASIC contain graphics statements and are easily fixed using QBASIC help.
(3) if you hate to enter source code, the software is available on diskette from the publisher for a small fee ...(includes GWBASIC and QBASIC examples)
(4) I've discovered "BASIC programmer" web sites where both GWBASIC and QBASIC are available for free download. ... Read more

Book Description

This book is a compact introduction to the program Mathematica, which is widely used in mathematics, as well as in the natural and engineering sciences. The essential basics of Mathematica versions 3 and 4 (front end, kernel and most important standard packages) are explained with simple, non-field specific examples and exercises. After working through the book, readers will be able to solve problems from their own special fields by themselves and to find additional support in the online documentation.

The included CD-ROM contains the entire book in the form of Mathematica notebooks, with color versions of the graphics and animations. Hyperlinks built into the notebooks serve as internal references and point to the program's online documentation and to resources on the internet. The CD-ROM is compatible with Win95/98/NT, Mac and Unix and contains the program MathReader, with which the notebooks can be viewed without a complete installation of Mathematica.

The book is aimed at beginners in Mathematica on levels and is particularly suitable for classroom use.

Includes CD-ROM containing the Mathematica notebooks of the lessons. ... Read more