Preface

Mathematica's programming language is an important addition to a comprehensive symbolic computation system. To the novice, it may seem overwhelming, with close to 1000 built-in functions. As we will show in Chapter 1, it nevertheless has a coherent style and it is easy to learn. The significance of Mathematica's programming language can also be judged from the fact that it is used for teaching programming at a growing number of universities. One of the most rewarding features is that a clarifying picture and other means of explaining how programs work is never far away. One has the whole power of Mathematica at one's disposal.

The large number of ways to solve some given problem make it necessary to point out the easy way of doing things, especially to users who have been familiar with one of the traditional programming languages. The designers' view was expressed in my first book, Programming in Mathematica. My goal was to explain the ideas behind the language and to develop useful example programs. This strategy is continued in an ongoing series of articles in the Mathematica Journal, entitled The Mathematica Programmer. The title of this series is now also the title of this book. The articles can be divided roughly into two kinds: explanations of fundamental programming paradigms and applications. This distinction is reflected in the two parts that make up this book. Besides the articles from the journal, I also included new material, such as Chapter 1. The material from the articles has been expanded and all program listings are now included.

The first articles appeared before version 2.0 of Mathematica. Since there have been major improvements from version 1 to version 2, I took the opportunity to update all programs and their descriptions to version 2.

Pictures are always a good means of explaining things. The beauty of well-chosen graphics illustrations is in itself an important aspect of the otherwise rather dry world of computers. The color insert in this book gives me the chance to show the full range of possibilities. In all cases Mathematica delivered the raw data, which was then turned into color illustrations using a variety of techniques.

Our thanks go foremost to the past and present staff of the Mathematica Journal: Richard Rawles, Silvio Levy, Alan Zeichick, Troels Peterson, and Peter Altenberg. We would like to thank Miller-Freeman, Inc., for giving us permission to include the articles from the Mathematica Journal in this book. Help with the color illustrations came from R. Peikert at IPS (Interdisciplinary Project Center for Supercomputing) of ETH, Zurich. We thank Stephen Wolfram for his inspiration and for the foreword. We are grateful to Chuck Glaser from AP Professional for encouraging us to publish this project and to Brian Miller for his production help. The expertise in phototypesetting at the AMS has greatly eased the burden of actually typesetting something like this.