I'm not sure if there is another version that has these in place. Short of writing two different books, I'm not sure what else the author could do.Īs mentioned above, more internal links would be nice. For instructors using the book for a linear algebra class, I'd imagine they'd ignore the calculus chapters. For instructors using the book for a calculus class, it might seem strange to start with vectors and matrices, but that's the nature of the program so there is no way around it. The optimal order of the topics I think is going to depend on who is using the book. The chapters seem to be divided into logical sections. What you see in the book will be very similar to what you see on your screen. The graphs are the output from the graphics commands in Octave, so it would be easy to follow along. The author uses screenshots or something similar to display the Octave commands in action. Much of the consistency is probably due to Octave itself, but I found no glaring inconsistent terminology. It is written in very straightforward prose that I believe students could easily follow.
I doubt the basic commands given in this book will change much though. Updating periodically will be necessary since new features will undoubtedly be added to Octave in the future. Octave should be pretty stable as a mature software product. The topics that are covered are pretty timeless. I know the software changes from time to time, so I would not be surprised to find a command or two that doesn't work as advertised, but I found none that didn't work. I've spot checked commands given and everything seems in order. In particular, in the section on limits in calculus, if you try to calculate some limits simply by evaluating at values of x closer and closer to the limiting value of x, you can get some strange and misleading answers due to the nature of floating point computations. Students will be surprised otherwise they start getting weird answers in some places. It might be nice if there was a discussion of floating point arithmetic in the book. Also, the ability to go from the table of contents to a section and back to the table of contents would be really nice. It might be too difficult to do, but linking the index items to to their page in the text would be really nice. The index appears to cover all of the major topics. I expect that once one got the hang of Octave, it would be easy to figure out the things that one might need that are not covered. Reviewed by Jeff Graham, Associate Professor, Susquehanna University on 3/19/20įor an introduction, it has all the things one would need. Journalism, Media Studies & Communications.
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