"Essential...a welcome addition to the literature. The choice of topics and their presentation are lucidly informed by considerable experience. The writing style is straightforward and clear. The authors stick resolutely to their goal of producing an introductory text, not a complete treatment, on programming in Mathematica. As such it is highly successful, full of useful examples that show how the ideas can be immediately and fruitfully exploited."
The Mathematica Journal
"The two introductory chapters on the Mathematica language provide a wonderful, and very clear, introduction to use on the beginners level...The chapter introducing the language does a masterful job of covering many of the most important features in just 21 pages, truly remarkable given the breadth and depth of the language...Part of the value here is that the authors do not merely provide a few sample programs, but actually take the time to detail the value of writing your own. Once the novice becomes familiar with the basic concepts, tests of understanding are provided by chapter exercises."
Scientific Computing
"...Familiar with Mathematica this would be an excellent self study text to improve their understanding of how to use its considerable range of programming tools...Also there are exercises and solutions as well as a couple of useful appendices on how Mathematica performs its calculations and debugging. It would thus seem an excellent course text."
S French, Journal of the Operational Research Society
An Introduction to Programming with Mathematica® is designed to introduce the Mathematica programming language to a wide audience. Since the last edition of this book was published, significant changes have occurred in Mathematica and its use worldwide. Keeping pace with these changes, this substantially larger, updated version includes new and revised chapters on numerics, procedural, rule-based, and front-end programming, and gives significant coverage to the latest features up to, and including, Mathematica 5.1 Mathematica notebooks, available from www.cambridge.org/0521846781, contain examples, programs, and solutions to exercises in the book. Additionally, material to supplement later versions of the software will be made available. This is the ideal text for all scientific students, researchers, and programmers wishing to deepen their understanding of Mathematica, or even those keen to program using an interactive language that contains programming paradigms from all major programming languages: procedural, functional, recursive, rule-based, and object-oriented.
About the Author
Paul R. Wellin directs the Wolfram Education Group at Wolfram Research, where he has worked since 1993. He has taught mathematics at both public school and at the university level for over 12 years. He has given talks, workshops, and seminars around the world on the integration of technical computing and education and has served on numerous government advisory panels on these issue. He is the author of several books on Mathematica. Richard J. Gaylord is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Life member of Clare College at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge England. He has conducted research in theoretical polymer physics and on random walks, as well as in computer simulation modeling in the physical, chemical, biological, economic, and social sciences using Mathematica and is the author of numerous books on Mathematica. Samuel N. Kamin is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are in the area of programming languages, compilers, and run-time code generation. He is the author of several books, including Programming Languages: An Interpreter-Based Approach (1990). More recently, he started an educational technology research group in his department, and has been exploring the development and uses of educational applications for the Tablet PC.