Modeling

I was asked to teach a course of the same title, and the this text was already listed for the course. A few pages of each chapter are useful. The figures are good and the given definitions of lists, trees, and graphs are good. However, only a few pages are devoted per topic to definitions and related terminology. The remaining parts (bulk) of the chapters are devoted to academic C-language implementations of data structures and algorithms. Few, if any of the implementations scale well. There is an unnecessary emphasis on recursion. Complexities of the C language are introduced which distract from the main topic of the book. Much of the complexity is pointless, particularly from the point of view of efficient, intuitive coding practice. Even when C was a prominent industrial implementation language -- you would not want to train the work force in this manner. Look for another text.

This book has an interesting premise of focusing statistics for business at the mid-level using the JMP software. The concepts addressed are the right ones, even the order is good.

However, on the downside, it is very difficult to read. The cases are not well explained. This book is used at Wharton's 1st year core course in statistics and the general agreement is that it is very hard to comprehend it. I recommend an editor to the authors.

The stated goal of this book is to introduce the science of chemical modeling to newcomers. It assumes the reader has little knowledge of crystallography, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, or computer programming; the four fields upon which chemical modeling is built upon. As such, the book does an adequate job. The math is adequate and well-documented. There is even coverage of the numerous techniques used in chemical modeling. And there are relevant examples of how modeling is applied.

The book could be written better though. The text is written in first-person, and would flow better written in third-person. The figures and tables/charts are good. There are adequate references to other sources that expand upon what is covered in the text. All in all, this is a good text to use in undergraduate chemistry / materials science courses to introduce students to atomistic scale modeling.

THE BOOK IS VERY WELL WRITTEN, BUT OVER HALF THE BOOK DESCRIBES THE EFFECTS OF COLORS AND ALL THE DISPLAYS ARE B & W, AND USELESS. THE WEBSITE THAT YOU ARE REFERED TO DOES NOT YET HAVE MOST OF THE DISPLAYS. BUT I DONT GENERALLY READ A BOOK SITTING IN FRONT OF MY COMPUTER ANYWAY. A BOOK ON COLOR THEORY SHOULD BE IN COLOR EVEN IF THE COST IS MORE. HOWEVER I DO BELIEVE THE WRITTEN TEXT IS USEFULL AND EASY TO READ. WITH COLOR IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A GREAT REFERENCE.

For the reader well-versed in Mathematica and in economic theory, this book gives a fairly good overview of how Mathematica can be used to study mathematical economics and finance. It is also assumed in the articles in the book that the reader has a strong background in mathematics. Since the book was published in 1993, Mathematica has considerably expanded, with many new features that make some of the accompanying code in the book somewhat dated, but the notebooks can still be used beneficially.In addition, economic theory is currently making more use of symbolic programming, and financial analysis has exploded as an area which is now making heavy use of high-performance computing. Although Mathematica cannot compete from a performance standpoint with the needs of financial engineering, it still has an advantage from a didactic standpoint. I did not read all of the articles in the book, so my comments will be limited to the ones that I did.

The article on "Mathematica and Diffusions" is an overview of how to use Mathematica to do stochastic calculus. The Ito calculus is reviewed briefly, and the authors begin with constructing a Weiner process. The Mathematica package they employ and on the disk accompanying the book is not discussed in detail, but is merely used to simulate realizations of the process. Readers who want a more in-depth view will have to go over the code themselves. The authors use the package to generate realizations of Weiner processes that are correlated with each other, and show this correlation via Mathematica graphics. The Black-Scholes formula is derived using the standard self-financing trading strategy and ignoring transaction costs and dividends. The algebraic manipulations are done with Mathematica, and this obscures (a little) the underlying concepts behind the derivation of this important formula. Since data structures in Mathematica are essentially lists, the authors outline the construction of the data structure that could be used to represent a diffusion, namely a list consisting of five terms: the diffusion, Weiner process name, expression for the drift and dispersion, and the initial value. For the reader familiar with OO-programming, accessor functions are used to extract the components of this data structure. This is a nice move by the authors, for it is an example of how Mathematica can be used to emulate OO-programming.

The article "Itovsn3: Doing Stochastic Calculus with Mathematica" is an overview of how to use the Itovsn3 package that is on the disk to implement Ito calculus. It is assumed that the reader has a background in stochastic calculus, since the author does not give a review. However, semimartingales, so important to those working in financial engineering, are discussed and their statistical behavior described using Mathematica. The Ito formula is presented as a semimartingale-type decomposition for smooth function of Brownian motion and the author shows using Mathematica plots how the higher order terms in the second-order Taylor expansion vanish asymptotically. This article is not merely Mathematica code for Ito calculus, for the author gives an example of how to use the package in a hedging problem.

The article "Option Valuation" is a more detailed overview of how to use Mathematica in the context of the Black-Scholes model to perform options valuation and risk management. Heavy use is made of the graphics capability of Mathematica to illustrate how option values change as a function of stock price and time of expiration. The author also shows how Mathematica can be used as a OO-language to treat options as self-contained objects with accessor functions. He does however state that Mathematica does not live up to the OO toolkits available elsewhere, contrary to my experience. He closes the article with a consideration of how to use Mathematica to value options that can be exercised before expiry, the binomial model playing the central role in the discussion. It is here in particular that the performance of Mathematica is readily felt. The numerical number-crunching needed to do the calculations in these types of models cannot be done in Mathematica efficiently and profitably.

The article "Time Series Models and Mathematica" gives a general treatment on how Mathematica can be used to study ARIMA models for time series. Mathematica is used more interactively than the other articles and the visualization obtained is quite nice in giving the reader insight into such concepts as the moving average and the spectral density function. The author shows how to estimate the spectral density function and why periodogram techniques fall short in this estimation. I would have liked to see other techniques for studying time series discussed, such as neural networks and hidden Markov models, but the author does do a fairly good job with the ARIMA models.

This is a nice book for basics. I borrowed it from my friend and am reading it as a supplement to an advance level NURBS course that I am currently enrolled in an University. This book is easy to read and understand. But the price is exhorbitant. There are other popular advanced level Computer Graphics books available for almost half this price. I would give 4 star rating had not the price been too high. Recommended for all interested in Computer Graphics and Geometric modeling basics, If you can afford it.

i don't have any idea with the sedimentation but i have to make a related on this topic, thesis. how cann i know that what kind of book that suitable for me. what kind of model that i going to used. please inform me, thank you for your listening to thsi voice from far away country like thailand. thank you very much indeed.

your sincere, Supree leeratanaruk master degree student at Sirindhorn international institute of technology, thammasat University, bangkok, thailand

namwaan69_1@yahoo.com

There's a lot of talk in this book but not much code. When it does show code examples, it comes with few comments. I was referred to this book after I read Tom Chritiansen's review that said good words about its use of shared memory. I thought using shm in CGI programming is quite unusual and worth reading. But when I read the section(s), I find too much talk about how to manage a project and little explanation of the C/Perl program that uses shm. This book may be good to managers not for programmers.

This book is one of the first for Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server. The author does a very good job in reviewing the small details but somewhat misses the "big picture" for the non technical small business owner who wants knowledge enough to see the installation and configuration requirements, and perhaps install it himself. The book oscillates between step by step operations for the non technical and the very technical items are some what generalized. This is a little confusing to both types of readers. I was very suprised at the content of NT4.0 sections (very well done with excellent NT4.0 information) that did not reference the reader to how or if they are important to BackOffice Small Business Server. However, there is excellent coverage of potential trouble spots that will save the more technical installer many headaches. Not a book for the small business owner or the non-computer experienced installer. Written before the 4.0a upgrade Service ! release. Easy read and good style.