The MAPLE Book

Rating:
Summary: A very good and up-to-date book for learning Maple.
Review: This book is a good choice for engineers, scientists or students who need to learn Maple 7 in a short time. The first chapters are written as a hands-on tutorial, beginning with Maple's environment and basic commands and progressing step by step toward programming structures, document preparation and ample discussions of some higher math topics (such as differential equations, 2d and 3d graphics, linear algebra, vector calculus, complex analysis and statistics).
The last chapter contains overviews of many other packages (about group theory, number theory, combinatorics and a lot of other things), including the new packages found in release 7.
There is also a glossary, a bibliography and references to Maple sites in the web.
On the other hand, you should know that the author does not delve into Maple's inner workings. He does not explain in depth what a data structure is in Maple, or how expressions are evaluated. Well, most of us can live without that... but if you are planning to do lots of programming with Maple, or perhaps writing a new package, probably you'll need more information.