The core of this book is a set of 22 projects, based on real-life scenarios, that involve the writing of programs to solve problems. The projects are a valuable adjunct to a first course in numerical analysis.
The problems range over a wide field of applications and are written in a humorous style. They are formulated well, with sufficient information and hints to enable students to start readily. The author recommends the use of the NAG FORTRAN Workstation Library, a subset of the NAG FORTRAN Library. The book contains the complete documentation for all the routines to be used to solve the problems. (Routines from the NAG FORTRAN Library are sometimes also recommended, but are not essential.) The use of a software library is an important feature. It enables the students to progress far more rapidly to difficult problems and is a good preparation for their later careers, when the use of a library is almost always preferred to the writing of their own routines.
The projects involve the following topics in numerical methods:
floating-point arithmetic
polynomial interpretation
root finding
linear equations
linear least squares
differential equations (initial value and boundary value problems)
quadrature spline interpolation
optimization
The book contains answers to the projects. An important part of problem solving is graphing the results. The book contains complete sample programs and graphs for some of the projects. The plotting programs use the NAG Graphical Library but could be adapted readily to another graphics package. I recommend this book for practice in a first course in numerical methods.
