NUMERICAL RECIPES IN C
by William H. Press, Brian P. Flannery, Saul A. Teukolsky, William T. Vetterling · first published 1988
29% recommend42% neutral29% critical
Why HN recommends it
Wry, opinionated writing that makes a dense subject readable. It serves as a practical reference for numerical algorithms and remains useful for working programmers over a career.
Common criticism: Restrictive license limits using its code directly; critics call the terms restrictive.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…will be encountered and the limits of the method. The writing is so informative that you may return to read it again and again throughout your career. One of my favorite texts that reaches Stage 3 is Numerical Recipes in C (which unfortunately I don't have much occasion to refer to nowadays), and the way that programming philosophy, advice, and technical instruction combines in that work is very impressive. Also, many…
on “Learning technical writing using the engineering method (2016) [pdf]” ↗"Numerical Recipes in C" This was the first programming book that actually made me laugh at times. The writer's style is wry and very accessible. His strong opinions and commentary kept me glued. Admittedly I didn't read every…
on “Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?” ↗kind of an old school selection: Deitel & Deitel (all of them?) Kernighan & Ritchie - The C Programming Language Numerical Recipes in C
on “Ask HN: What are your top 3 Comp Sci books?” ↗…(Ellis/Stroustrup) -- What a fantastic little book, also got it for $4.95 at Powell's bookstore in Portland :) IMO this books provides a gentle introduction to C++, you can flip to any page and just start reading. 4. Numerical Recipes in C (Press, Teukolsky, et al.) - If I need to quickly prototype some scientific computation kernel, this is my go-to book. 5. Effective C++ 3rd edition (Meyers) - I like to approach this book from the back…
on “Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?” ↗Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing https://www.cec.uchile.cl/cinetica/pcordero/MC_libros/Numeri...
on “Ask HN: Which math/CS books follow a top-down approach for pedagogy?” ↗I would add "Numerical Recipes in C" to the list. I have owned this book for many years and get allot of use out of it. http://bit.ly/zHQyeC
on “Books every self-taught computer scientist should read” ↗be sure to read "numerical recipes in c" chapter 16 first. fwiw the only thing you need to do to be one of the best references on numerical integration in js on the net is translate the code to javascript...
on “Modeling Physics in Javascript: Gravity and Drag” ↗…O(n) mean? The compound interest formula matrix/linear algebra, numerical analysis The statistics behind A/B testing numerical approximation of a derivative, integral, differential equation Read "numerical recipes in C"
on “Ask HN: What are some important math topics every programmer should know?” ↗You might want to refer to the book "Numerical Recipes in C."
on “What are the algos for differentiating and integrating functions?” ↗…parenthesized (because it is a compound form, represented as a list). You can see from the following large exmaple that it still looks like LIsp; it is a compromise. I took an example FFT routine from the book Numerical Recipes in C and transliterated it, to get a feel for what it's like to write a realistic numerical routine that contains imperative programming "warts" like using assignments to initialize variables and such:…
on “Why Fennel?” ↗This reminds me of a book called "numerical recipes in C", full of algorithms that were very useful except you couldn't really use them because the authors protected their use with a very restrictive license.
on “Disney claims anyone using a Twitter hashtag is agreeing to their terms of use” ↗Yes, it is in fact so "simple" that you have to bang it on the head and shout at it to get it to actually do anything. For the audience of this article, a good test is to compare a copy of Numerical Recipes in c versus the fortran edition, where the whole purpose of the book is to present numerical code to scientists. c (and c++) have to spend ages developing up notation and workarounds for the simplest matrix…
on “The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy (2006)” ↗I'd be tempted to add Numerical Recipes in C to the second list. I've often referred to it for various algorithmic problems thinking that it will be helpful and practical (examples in C!), but I'm usually disappointed. Most of it is targeted at…
on “Books Programmers Don't Really Read But Recommend” ↗I thought I read this somewhere before, googling it. Ah this is Roedy's original pdf from 2000 http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/jv/510s05/unmaint.pdf I found numerical recipes in c to be pretty tricky when I started coding. It still can be unless you know the algorithms up and down (certainly with the shifted vectors/matrices...)
on “How To Write Unmaintainable Code” ↗…argument about pointer arithmetic. Both arrays use exactly the same calculation to access. Think this looks like a bad idea? That's opinion and convention, and nothing more. This code snippet comes from "Numerical Recipes in C, 2nd Ed.", in which they use one-based arrays in C frequently. In that edition, they also advocated switching on the fly :O. Later editions switched to zero-indexed arrays due to dominant convention.…
on “The origin of zero-based array indexing” ↗