Number 1, November 1996.
Number 1, November 1996.
Review by Sjoerd M. Verduyn Lunel, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) verduyn@fwi.uva.nl
In a few weeks time the second edition of Heck's Introduction to Maple will arrive in the bookstores. The new edition is based on Maple V Release 4 and has nineteen chapters, over 200 references and an index consisting of 48 pages.
As the first edition, this new edition does not only contain the necessary parts that every introduction to Maple should contain, such as getting started, data types and variables, internal data representation, composite data types, graphics, etc., but also several topics that illustrate the use of computer algebra in general, such as differentiation, integration, summation, series expansions, manipulation of rational expressions, solving equations etc. The book is different from a reference guide. Many features of Maple are not formally defined, you learn them through examples. You observe how the ``master'' goes along solving the problem. Already in the next step you can try to imitate the given approach to your own problems. The reader should follow the author's advice ``read this book in conjunction with the Maple system''. To make this easy the source code of all Maple sessions in the book can be obtained by anonymous ftp from the author.
The lay-out of the book, in particular the Maple output, has been improved considerably. All chapters have been modified and updated according to the new version of Maple. Many new features of Maple are carefully described in the book both in separate sections as well as in the existing examples in case the new features could simplify the computations. Throughout the book the assume facility of Maple is used and a new separate chapter on this facility was added.
The chapter Variables and Names about data structures in Maple has been complemented with sections about attributes and properties of data types. The chapter Getting Around with Maple a very useful section about importing and exporting numerical data is added. The chapter Functions has a new section on piecewise defined functions. The chapter Composite Data Types has been expanded with a separate sections about tables in Maple, evaluation of arrays, tables and procedures, and function calls. The chapter Graphics has been doubled in size. Many interesting features about the plot facilities of Maple have been added. In particular, there is a very useful section on data plotting with examples using data from the real world. The chapter Differential Equations has now a special section on DEtools with interesting plots for the propagation of a shock wave in a first order PDE. The chapter Linear Algebra has also been expanded and a complete description of the package linalg is included. There is an interesting section on standard decompositions of matrices such as the LU decomposition, the QR decomposition and the Cholesky decomposition. There are also a number of exercises added.
A few points of criticism that I made in my review about the first edition
remain. In particular, the definition of on page 608 is not correct.
But aside from this, inspired by ``The Power Edition'' of Maple the author
put an enormous amount of effort to write ``The Power Edition'' of his book.
A must for every Maple user.
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