Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A good introduction to C++ for simple quantitative analysis, 8 April 2001
By A Customer
I learnt C++ in 1998 and now program in it for an investment bank in London. And I have to say, this is actually quite a good book - and one I find myself coming back to over and over again. It has a nice introduction to operator overloading, developing a fairly simple class to represent complex numbers. The algorithms in this book aren't as extensive as in Numerical Recipes in C, but the code quality (readability, maintainability) is much better.It'll not be the most advanced C++ book on your shelf, but that's because you'll be ready for Stroustrup and Lippman's books after this. Fact is, with C++, you don't need to spend a ton of time ploughing through textbook examples of algorithms for sorting, string manipulation, data structures as the langugage together with the Standard Template Library includes support for most of these humdrum tasks. As a language should... What you do need, is to get familiar with object oriented design and coding in your field. And if your field, like mine, involves mathematics, then you can't argue with this book for around twenty quid.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Easy to understand intro. to C++, but not very in depth :-(, 18 Sep 2000
By A Customer
The author offers an introduction - for undergrad through professional - to C++, no experience requried. He's not kidding! If there's any programming experience required at all, I'd be surprised. He starts at the very basics, from how to include a file....through to some more complex things. A good feature of the book is that, as the title says, it is for scientists, engineers and mathematicians. The examples used show this. For example, when showing how to handle numbers, he uses a Newton-Raphson function. Later on, demonstrating the flexibility of C++ he gives a finite-difference technique-based program as an example. Another strength is that it's type set in TeX. Which means even scientists can read it! :-)As a whole, the book's quite complete and a nice little unit - you don't need other references to use what's in it. However, it doesn't go far enough. Noticeably missing is a section on object-oriented programming for numerical analysis applications; something that should reallly be in a book on C++ for scientists, etc. If you are one of the intended readers of this book, have no idea about programming and feel the need to get into it (frankly if you haven't, you probably ought to have at least some idea!) then this is a good introduction to get you started, but expect to buy a more advanced book once you've got the basics down to a fine art. If you HAVE got programming experience, I wouldn't recommend this book. Even if it's in another language, if your experience is more than minimal, you'd do better with a more advanced text. Afterall, the best way to learn it is to do it. So just try.
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