Rating: 
Summary: C routines on the disk are marginally useful
Review: There is no question that the book is a valuable resource. It draws on classic references such as Bevington's 'Data Reduction and Error Analysis...' or other good books such as Acton's 'Numerical Methods that Work.' Very nice when you need a quick understanding on how to approach/attack a problem.I find myself disappointed with the software on the disk you purchase separately. What I was expecting/hoping was ASCII files with the source code so that I wouldn't have to type it in myself from the book; however, it is in Windows DLL format. This is not very useful if you'd like to use the code on different platforms. One puzzling thing is that the Windows disk is about $35, while they offer an on-line download Unix version for $50 ($150 for the multi-user license). I don't understand why there would be differences between the two unless the NR software is not ANSI-C compliant. If this is the case, then I'd consider the software useless. Recommendation: Buy the book as a reference. Use different software.
Rating: 
Summary: good book, bad policy
Review: This is a very useful book for scientists and engineers, it collects codes for many most-often-encountered numerical problems, and the discussion is lucid, frank and helpful. However, the author adopted a very bad policy: they do not permit users to distribute their code. So suppose you write an application program which uses lots of integrations, linear algebra and differential equation routines, you would naturally like to use the numerical recipe routines for these basic tasks, but if you want to make your code freely available to others, you find you can't, because the numerical recipes routines are copyrighted and the authors forbid you to distribute even part of them with your code(except for a few public domain routines). They suggest you use the Netlib code which is freely available, however, since there is no systematic documentation, it is more difficult to use the netlib code. In any case, what is the point of having this book and its code if you have to use netlib code? this is really a trouble for the readers and users of this book. On the other hand, the authors provided their book online free of charge, but this is of little use--most readers would buy the book anyway, and prefer to have the code free.
Rating:
Summary: A great book with okay code.
Review: This is an excellent text, filled with code segments, a few equations, and lots of glorious plain english *words* in which the authors share their practical experience on how to go about getting useful work done. If you've ever wanted to really understand numerical methods, or just want to make an intelligent choice between alternative approaches to a problem, this book is a gold mine. The code itself, however, is a bit quaint. It does compile, and mostly work, but it's not the sort of thing you'd want to gamble a medical instrument or space flight on. (The code has the look and feel of 30 year old fortran which was rudely translated to C by some hapless grad student.) Take the time to understand the routines that really matter for your application and reimplement them, with better error checking and/or optimizations to suit your needs. (Very likely the first thing you'll do is a global search to replace the string "float" with "double". That alone will bring the code out of the 70's and up to somehwere in the middle 80's)
Rating:
Summary: More than recipes -- amazingly clear explanations.
Review: This is an incredible book. It doesn't just compile algorithms (recipes), it explains how they work. These explanations are crystal clear. You don't have to be a math whiz to follow the discussion, they use plain language and clear logic.
Rating: 
Summary: A nice classic
Review: What I didn't like: the license for the source code is very
restrictive. Some things might have been implemented otherwise
(better?, oh well). Arrays use a 1-offset instead of 0 offset
as is the convention in C.
What I did like: the exposition and organization. It may not
provide the best solutions, but the ones provided are good enough
and readable.
Rating: 
Summary: best for enginerr who have sufficient mathmatical backgroud.
Review: When you have sufficient mathematical background and basci ANSI C programming, this book help you understand and code program for many numerical analysis field greatly. Moreover the available C code help us great portablity and flexibility. From college, this book help my work very much
Rating:
Summary: Stupid conventions applied
Review: While I have been a big fan of the Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN, I was extremely disapponted in the C version. It adopts the convention of not using zero-based arrays, which is the ANSI-C standard. Instead it employs a series of hacked routines to use 1-based arrays. I personally find it very clumsy.
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