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Mathematica Cookbook Reviewed By Manoj Rengarajan of Bookpleasures.com
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Manoj Rengarajan

Reviewer Manoj Rengarajan holds a Master of Financial Engineering - University of California, Berkeley and he works in the investment management industry and specializes in providing economic and investment outlook and strategy for global equity and government bond markets. He has an educational background in financial engineering, business, and engineering, and professional interests include business, finance, economics, technology and related areas.

 
By Manoj Rengarajan
Published on November 23, 2010
 

Author: Sal Mangano
Publisher: O’Reilly
ISBN: 978-0596520991

Mathematica is a scientific programming environment which provides tools for quantitative problem solving in a broad range of areas including physical sciences, engineering, social science and finance.





Author: Sal Mangano
Publisher: O’Reilly
ISBN: 978-0596520991

Click Here To Purchase the Mathematica Cookbook

Mathematica is a scientific programming environment which provides tools for quantitative problem solving in a broad range of areas including physical sciences, engineering, social science and finance.

The Mathematica Cookbook should appeal to a broad range of professionals who are interested in problem solving areas including engineering, science, financial engineering, and not to mention mathematics and statistics.

In the first part of the book, there are cases that highlight the basic features of the language including numerics, efficient programming, data structures, string manipulation and graphics.
The books starts with the basics of numerics including the representation and the display formats in Mathematica. Throughout the book, there is an emphasis on the core principles of problem solving with Mathematica.

Functional programming is the core paradigm of working in the Mathematica environment. There are several cases that demonstrate how to implement efficient and elegant programs in this system.

Basic data structures such as lists and matrices and how to manipulate and work with them efficiently are show next with several examples. This is followed by several cases which highlight the powerful and essential pattern matching and replacement facilities in Mathematica.

Typical functions for string manipulation and regular expression based transformations are followed by graphics functionalities which are closely integrated with the development environment. Graphics functionalities are useful for both presentation as well as for understanding the data. Visualization and interaction capabilities of 3D graphics are brought out excellently.
In the second part of  the book, the emphasis is on applications in different domains in which Mathematica offers significant problem solving capabilities. Starting with highlights about the native support for transforming images programatically, the book gives deeper insights into the algorithms. Similarly, there are very interesting cases on functions to play sound notes, importing music files and analyzing them.

One of the strongest areas of Mathematica is symbolic math. The book brings out the strength of the platform very well in algebraic manipulations and solutions to equations. Standard statistical capabilities including measures, probability distributions, data fitting, interpolations, and stochastic simulations are also highlighted effectively.
Examples in applied math showcase high level problem solving in physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. There is a separate chapter on problem solving for financial engineering which details the various numerical techniques for working with fixed income and derivative securities.

Finally, the third part of the book focuses on special topics for using the software. This includes highlighting the dynamic interactivity of the software, parallel processing features, integrating Mathematica to databases and other programming languages, and tips for performance and organizing projects.

The Mathematica Cookbook is a comprehensive source of solid solutions which focuses on highlighting the key capabilities of the language, domains in which the tool can be used and using the tool with greater efficiency. Thus, the book is strongly recommended both for a novice as well as a more experienced user.

Click Here To Purchase the Mathematica Cookbook