Hands-On Start to Wolfram Mathematica: And Programming with the Wolfram Language 2nd. Edition

it's excellent. it's the best textbook about Mathematica I have ever read. And I am a Mathematica user since Version 1. That is more than 25 years. And even after writing a lot of programs, packages and personal functions, I still find it useful for me. Imagine the usefulness for a beginner..In all these long 25 years I purchased a good number of texts about Mathematica, in addition to all the manuals Wolfram published till version 5.,including Reference Guides.Books written by Gray, Glynn, Ruskeepaa,, Maeder, Blachman, Trott, Wellin, Shaw, Tigg, all excellent books, but, in my opinion, not written with the new users in their mind. Let me ask you. Do you tried ever to read a Dictionary?. Your answer will most probably be : NO. You don't read dictionaries. You open them only when you need them.. That's the case with the majority of these texts. You open them when you need to learn how to deal with a command you are interested in when writing your code. These books try to be exhaustive, but it is impossible to be exhaustive with a system like Mathematica.This Hands-on-Start to Wolfram Mathematica is the first book about Mathematica I really enjoyed reading, and not opening it only to learn a specified command. New users will surely enjoy reading it and in the meanwhile learn a lot, without being intimidated by the complexities of Mathematica. For me, the most impressive achievement of the authors is the user friendly way they wrote this book, due surely to their profound interest to help the readers understand how to use Mathematica. Of course the book do not try to be exhaustive. It would be impossible.trying to be.exhaustive and at the same time be a book that teach how to start using Mathematica. I hope the authors will continue with their efforts to teachnew users, and also not so new ones. how to take the best Mathematica has to offer..

Wolfram's Hand-On Start to Wolfram Mathematica is a much needed introduction to Mathematica 10. It's been a good long time since Wolfram published a manual to its computational masterpiece so this certainly helps a lot. This is a workbook that hobbyists and professionals can learn the basics of Mathematica. Mathematica is a huge program with nearly 5,000 functions. The last time Wolfram produced a hard copy manual was Mathematica Book, Fifth Edition. With 1464 pages it went over all the functions of the for the Mathematica 5.0 and came out in 2003. It was truly an math encyclopedia. It was also quite well written and an excellent textbook. In the intervening twelve years the number of functions has more than doubled. So a manual like the Mathematica Book would be a true encyclopedia with over five thousand pages. So, the manual is now part of the extensive help menu along with a library of pdf books. Some of us would still prefer a paper edition. This fills that need.The text is divided into two parts, the first part goes over the basics of mathematica. How to use the program. The Wolfram language conventions. How to use the word processor function, graphs, and how to create demostrations. The second part is a closer examination of various concepts in depth. Such as algebraic manipulation, calculus, export and import of data. Since Mathematica keeps everything and only makes additions to the big program, users of older editions of Mathematica can still find a lot of good information. The text is clear with wide margins, the authors used color effectively, and pointed the Mathematica user to resources contained online and in the program itself. This is a must have book for any Mathematica user. I recommend it highly.

After going through the first hundred pages, I felt obliged to write a review to advise anyone new to Mathematica to buy this book. I have been through several other books which have been useful, but this book covers many critically important topics that are not covered elsewhere. Other books focus on using the Mathematica language for input and leaves you trying to memorize commands and how they are used. But by using free form input, autocompletion, command templates, suggestion bars, learning how to work with units, etc, you will accelerate your ability to solve problems. In addition I've not seen word processing and typesetting explained elsewhere. I've only glanced through the rest of the book, but it equally informative.By the way, the unique code is on the inside of the back cover.

Often uses complex examples when supposedly explaining simple concepts. Good about showing solutions to exercises but sometimes not about explaining why their approach was taken. Occasionally uses features from earlier versions of Mathematica that are no longer supported (or no longer needed) in current versions. Left me feeling like I might understand what a command would do, but having little idea why anyone would want to do it. Still, this book is better than Wolfram's own new book. But you will learn more, more quickly, from Schaums Outline of Mathematica.

It's a decent introduction to Mathematica, but many subtleties are missed. Many commands are missing good examples that show the potential uses and pitfalls of them. For example, NDSolve is explained in the text, but you need to search on line to find anything but the simplest example. Two or three more complicated examples of some of these powerful tools would help. This is a common failing with a lot of Wolframs materials-videos run through examples at warp speed, assumptions of competence are made throughout, examples don't illustrated the work in a comprehensive manner. It presents a real challenge for students and novices to get a good grounding in Mathematica. The book is not a great reference, but ok to get started.

Not very useful if you want to actually do math. Suggest you buy a used copy of the older "The Mathematica Book." I lent my copy of "The Mathematica Book" to a friend and thought I'd get the latest compendium. Very disappointing. Better to blunder around in the help files of the program and figure out what you need, rather than to follow these unfocused tutorials.

As a professional mathematician with a background in applied maths I found this to be an extremely useful book. It’s NOT a book that explains every single Mathematica function (for that just use online help from the Mathematica website). It is a book of tips on how to get your results quickly, how to use Mathematica most efficiently, how to produce book quality documents in Mathematica, produce figures etc etc.After years of not being able to find a suitable method of integrating maths, text and pictures for my notes this is wonderful!!(Evernote: no maths, LaTeX: great for typesetting but no calculations!, Word: the same...) A wonderful book!

My first impression is that this text is well written and very well presented. As others have commented, there is no index but I don't think that is a problem. The text is aimed primarily at the novice user of Mathematica but will probably be useful as a reference source for more advanced users. The book does recommend that the user has Mathematica available on computer; if you don'r have a copy available, a free (time limited) trial version of Mathematica 11 is available from Wolfram Research on-line. For the home/amateur user Wolfram Research offer Mathematica at a very reasonable discount.

I love this book. Mathematica is an ocean of Computation and as a novice this book is a gem to start with. I heightly recomend it.Instruction are easy and clear to grasp the concept.

Right up my street. Very well laid out and produced. The explanations were clear and easy to follow. Umm, where's the index?

I've bought the book and kindle version. Perfect both.