Review of
An
Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language,
by Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Media Inc., Champaign, Illinois, 2015. 324 pp.,
$19.95 (paper). ISBN 9781944183004.
Five out of five stars
Reading through
this book, three characteristics of the Wolfram programming language are very
clear. The first is that it has enormous breadth of capabilities, it can of
course do the mathematics that Mathematica is famous for. It can also perform
an enormous amount of complex graphics, only part of which is mathematical in
nature and it has significant audio capabilities.
The second is
that is is extremely succinct, the commands demonstrated in this book all
easily fit on a single line. While some of them are a bit cryptic due to the
brevity and the complexity of the objects they are referencing, they are
surprisingly easy to understand. Nothing like the old days of command line
programming.
The third
characteristic is the breadth and power of the databases that can be accessed
using the Wolfram language. Some of the examples in the book reference a
database of information about the planets of our solar system and show you some
of the ability to derive and develop processed and displayed datasets.
Graphic artists
use specialized programs to aid them in their creations, social scientists use
statistical packages, economists and financial planners use specialized
programs and scientists use many different types of programs to process and analyze
their data. In this book you see a convergence, where the Wolfram language has
the ability to support all of them.
The blurb on
the back claims that no previous programming experience is necessary and I have
to concur with that, with a little bit of explanation, the example programs are
easy to understand. The only point of difficulty is an understanding of the
objects the program is acting on. For example, the reader needs to understand
what an array is before the code to operate on it can be understood.
A set of
exercises for the reader to program are included at the end of the chapters and
solutions are given in a section at the end. All of the material in the book is
available online at
This book was made available for free for review
purposes
No comments:
Post a Comment