A First Course in Computational Physics and Object-Oriented...

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 418 pages
• Published by: Cambridge University Press April 25, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0521827787
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0521827782
• Book Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.7 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 2.4 pounds

Reader Reviews
This book was developed during many years of teaching scientific programming to engineers and scientists in both electrical engineering and physics courses. About 1/3 of the text is accessible to beginning programmers even at a high-school level, while the last part of the book can serve as a second-term undergraduate scientific programming course or as a reference text. While the title indicates that a major focus of the text is computational physics, the book contains problems and examples from numerous scientific and engineering disciplines and can be employed across a wide variety of course offerings. Because of the practical difficulties faced by beginning students, a first course in scientific programming generally requires very significant personal intervention by the instructor or laboratory assistant. This book effectively removes this issue by providing a common base of free Windows software on CD-ROM that is meticulously documented in the text (the software is also available for Linux). The reader is introduced to programming through numerous assignments containing real-world technical problems. The assignments at first contain nearly the entire program to be developed; as the book develops, however, fewer code sections are provided. This method allows the user to absorb proper program structure while avoiding frustrating and confusing stylistic traps. A solution manual is made available to instructors through Cambridge University Press (see their website for errata) while the CD-ROM also contains copies of all programs presented in the text. This book presents a compact but completely unified picture of modern programming practice as it applies to scientific programming. The fundamental, underlying principles of the C++ language and scientific programming are stressed in order to simplify retention of complex C++ syntax and of the mathematical and physical content. More involved topics in numerical analysis, scientific programming methods and C++ are presented in an intuitive and easily-understood manner. Examples of the subjects covered are: software engineering principles (UML), numerical analysis, scientific graphics programming, the Standard Template Library (STL), Monte-Carlo methods including the Metropolis and multicanonical techniques, partial differential equation solvers, calling Fortran from C++, C++ program optimization. Comment | | (Report this)