Optimization Using Personal Computers: With Applications to Electrical Networks

Rating:
Summary: a good engineering style book for engineers
Review: I am an electrical engineering student with good matrix theory and linear algebra training. It makes the book very close (or dear) to me.

I like its style, very engineer oriented. There are examples, programs, even numbers, exercises. The theorems, equations, and important points are in tables and well numbered. If you enjoy reading user manual for your vacuum cleaner or technical document for programming languages, this book is like these in style. It is a well-written "user manual" for solving optimization problems.

Still the Chinese proverb: I hear, I forget. I see, I remeber. I do, I understand. This book gives you something to work on by yourself.

You may find the BASIC programs in the book a little bit out of date, if you are equipped with Mathematica or MATLAB. But the programs are still worth looking at, especially some can be helpful for understanding numerical analysis, too.

Here is an example from (Page. 39) Exercise 1.10 (using Mathematica)

simple substitution for solving this fixed point problem at x near 4 will diverge or fail to find one of the two fix points

f[x_]=0.5 Exp[0.5 x]

NestList[f, 4., 10]

Reap[FindRoot[f[x] == x, {x, 10}, StepMonitor :> Sow[x]]]