sutton036

O'Reilly just published a new book, the Mathematica Cookbook , about Wolfram Research's flagship product. This book contains many interesting examples from various different disciplines. Most of these are derived from freely available examples written by other people (primarily from Wolfram Research's original Mathematica Book and also the excellent Wolfram Demonstrations Project ) but the author has simplified some of the programs to make them more accessible. However, the density of the information in this book is incredibly low. Most pages are filled with superfluous Mathematica output that is often not even described in the text: Dozens of triples on page 15. Page 58 lists hundreds of numbers but the text does not even describe their significance. Page 205 lists all of the words with a subset of the letters "thanksgiv". Page 226 is raw XML data. Pages 264-265 are solid code that renders a snowman with circles and some dots for snow (all in black and white). Pa...

Our new book F# for Technical Computing has been published and is now available for order! This is currently the only published book to cover the latest version of the F# programming language and also covers the following exciting topics: Windows Presentation Foundation for interactive 2D and 3D graphics. The Task Parallel Library for shared-memory parallel programming on multicores and MPI for distributed parallelism on clusters. LINQ for the dissection of XML data. Sequence expressions. Asynchronous workflows for concurrent programming. Functional design patterns (tail calls, untying the recursive knot and continuation passing style). Purely functional data structures (balanced trees, tries, lazy streams and queues). Named and optional arguments. .NET interfaces including IEnumerable, IComparable and IDisposable. Performance in the context of caches and multicores. Reflection. Every graph in the book was created with our own F# for Visualization library and the complete source ...

Mike Hendrickson has been busy updating O'Reilly's analysis of the state of the computer book market by programming language. That means it is time for us to reiterate how authors of decent books can earn far more for their work by cutting out the middlemen including trade publishers like O'Reilly. Traditional book publishers are a dying breed. Aside from e-books, they have been driven out by an increasing number of so-called "self-published" books. In the context of software development, this is particularly common around non-mainstream subjects and includes titles such as OCaml for Scientists and Programming in Scala . O'Reilly's analysis excluded all such books even though they are far more profitable for authors. In order to make a case for self-publishing it is necessary to present some information about a variety of existing books: OCaml for Scientists was written and self-published in 2005 and is sold for £85 through the publisher's website....