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An Introduction to Computational Physics
Product Review 'This is an great textbook for course on computational physics and scientific computation.' Zentralblatt MATH Product Description Thoroughly updated and revised for its second edition, this advanced textbook provides an introduction to the basic methods of computational physics, and an overview of recent progress in several areas of scientific computing. Tao Pang presents many step-by-step examples, including program listings in JavaTM, of practical numerical methods from modern physics and related areas. Now including many more exercises, the volume can be used as a textbook for either undergraduate or first-year graduate courses on computational physics or scientific computation. It will also be a useful reference for anyone involved in computational research. Reader Reviews This review is from: An Introduction to Computational Physics (Paperback) Altohough I am not a fan of Fortran by any means the book (now that many of the original errors are corrected) is extremely thorough and readable, but be aware this is not necessarily for the neophyte. One MUST have a good knowledge of numerical anlaysis since derivations of relevant formulas is scant. The book's strength lies in the breadth of topics covered, here you will not find the often included "sport physics" chapter as an introduction, rather you are introduced to the most common numerical methods used by scientists when an analytical soultion is not feasible. The book does deal with many problems found int physics from scattering to quantum mechancis and molecular modelling, Monte Carlo methods and some case studies of applied physics e.g the chapter including ground water dynamics. In the last chapters the author wisely introduces symbolic computing using Mathematica as an example and this is applauded as many of us are not willing to reinvent the wheel since there many excellent programs like Maple, MathCad, FemLab etc and an introduction to the like is good. He also discusses parallel computing and this is also welcome as it has gained more prevalent use in computational sciences. A complaint, since the book claims by its title no less, that it is an introduction to computational physics, there should have been explict chapters on or at least a chapter on Sports Physics, Astronomy, Cellular Automata. That said the case studies on molecular dynamics, nuclear waste storage and chaos are great. All in all, a solid text but one should be aware of the fact that the author (and to some extent, rightly so) assumes that the reader has a solid grasp of numerical analsyis, calculus and physics. Having said that if you need a really simple and thorough, ground up introduction and haven't taken the aforementioned courses then try Giordano's Computational Physics, be warned if you are like me and can barely tolerate Fortran (I grew up on C/C++) then the True Basic code snippets (for Mac) in Giordano's book will irritate you to no end!! Comment | | (Report this)
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