Programming With Mathematica An Introduction By Paul Wellin Pdf

Message Boards

10716 Views

10 Replies

4 Total Likes

Well , I am kind of struck on deciding on how to start learning about Mathematica & Wolfram language. Can anyone suggest the best books which are available for learning Mathematica ??

From the Help menu open Wolfram Documentation. At the bottom you will see an Introductory Book link. Click it to get a pretty good introductory book by Stephen Wolfram.

Then try flying solo by doing mathematics from a simple non-Mathematica book, such as a college calculus book.

Hi Aashish, I recently spent some time reviewing introductory & intermediate level introductions to learning the Wolfram Language for a workshop at Oxford. I've posted my recommended learning resources and the notebooks and exercises from the workshop on http://shift-enter.org/

The right entry point will depend on your background. If you already have some scripting or programming experience, starting with the 'Fast Introduction for Programmers' summary will be more satisfying than an 'Elementary Introduction'. After that, I would recommend Wellin's new 'Essentials of Programming' book. Lastly, Mangano's 'Mathematica Cookbook' is a still very useful collection of starting points or 'recipes' to common problems, as is Shifrin's 'Mathematica Programming' for clear and deeper exposition of the WL's underlying concepts. I've linked to all but the Shifrin on the shift-enter site.

Edit: I should add, if you're looking specifically for course material, Wellin offers this, as does Turkel in 'Digital Research Methods', though you may (or may not!) find the latter's emphasis on digital humanities to be a little removed from your own interests.

I'd also highly recommend Wellin's book. I have the 2013 edition, and have found it to be worth every penny. It covers quite a breadth of Mathematica's functionality, and draws on a wide range of maths and science topics to illustrate and teach Mathematica's usage. It's introduced me to some new concepts in maths and science as well as in Mathematica which is a nice side benefit.

There are also plenty of interesting exercises with solutions (downloadable in PDF format). Although not exactly a reference book, its example based approach makes it useful to go back to again and again.

I believe the new edition also covers associations and other Mathematica 10 functionality.

Good luck in your learning!

Rob

What are the differences in coverage and depth between Paul Wellin's 2013 book Programming with Mathematica: An Introduction and his 2016 book *Essentials of Programming in Mathematica? (Aside from obvious things such as that Association was not introduced into the language until 2014 and, I presume, would not have appeared in the 2013 book.)

Yes, I already took a look at the tables of contents for both Wellin books. Given that the 2013 one was considerably longer (not counting the exercise solutions at its end), I wonder in particular whether that 2013 volume goes into some things a greater depth than in the new, 2016, volume.

That's a good point Murray, I hadn't notice until you'd mentioned it, but Wellin's website describes his newer book as a "more compact" introduction to Mathematica than the 2013 edition.

Intriguingly, the website lists a new book due imminently - Programming with Mathematica Applications. Unfortunately there are no other details, perhaps it is embargoed until the release of Mathematica 11. I'm very interested to see what it includes.

Mathematica is like the Band in a box of mathematics. Band in a box is a musical sequencer that includes musical styles based from many different musicians. Mathematica is an information system and it contains many functions that have been designed by other mathematicians. I own about 20 Mathematica books and NKS. Mathamtica is usually taught as a broad discussion that covers many different kinds of maths. The problem is that no one is familiar with the University math stars like rock stars and so people don't ordinarily understand how to discuss families of algorithms or math facts. Because Eric's site exists that is very helpful. I think history and math function and facts work together. I would translate what you want to do from regular programming books and ask questions when you get stuck. You could subscribe to like Safari Books online (wait till they offer it for $200 a year and you have access to 9 mathematica books and any language or anything that has to do with computers. Or you could just hunt up mathematica books on Amazon used and pick them up for real cheap. I have a large enough vocabulary to get through most math books so I can't give myself and excuse why I can't pass algebra 2. But I have been trying to put how the Mathematica world operates but this software introduces you to a world and so little of math is understood by most people. I am more interested in the historical pursuts rather than the functionality because my disability has limited me in the past because my vocabulary was so poor but now I have a better idea of what is happening.

I believe the best way to learn any programming language is learning by practice.

The first step is to read the elementary of wolfram language with the help of following book: https://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Introduction-Wolfram-Language/dp/1944183000

Then I suggest you to find your mathematical related interests, like data analysis, statistics, machine learning, etc. Trying to get to know more about the topic by doing related programming works with wolfram language, and you will have a better idea on APIs, techniques from wolfram language. Actually when I was a student, many of us were proficient in wolfram language because we were used to solve math and calculation problems by Mathematica ;)

If you are just interested in wolfram language itself, you can browse the posts here in the community with "staff-picks". Many posters use wolfram language to analyze practical problems, which are fun and you will be attracted by them. Certainly, community is your best friend and if you have any question, you can come here and ask for help.

Reply to this discussion in reply to

Attachments

Remove Add a file to this post