An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods: Applications to Physical Systems

Rating:
Summary: Makes Physics a pleasure
Review: Excellent, outstanding book for clarity, elegance, writing style and level of detail. This book won't leave you alone on the intricacies of marrying physics and computer programming and will make your programming activity more intereesting if you are more of a programmer and you physical studies more rewarding and less
"pen-and-paperlike" if you are an aspiring physicist. In fact I highly recommend this book to anyone that has an interest in how nature works and in playing with computers. The extreme clarity of this book makes it accessible to junior colege students and even to advanced, motivated high school students or for self study. I would have preferred to see the example code in the book
in C or better C++ but using BASIC has the advantage of making the book more esy to read and is just sligtly annoying for the
C++ or Java programmer. ( Are there any other kind of real programmers? ;) Just make sure you master your language enough to make calculations, use functions, and are able to produce at least some basic graphics (using C++ and openGL or DirectX would rock). Judge by yourself, but I would buy without a thought a book whose first chapter is on the "Coffe Cooling Problem".