Good books on numerical computation with C

Question

Hi, I've read the post "What is the best book on numerical methods?" and I wish to ask more or less the same question but in relation to C programming. Most of the time, C programming books on numerical methods are just another version of the author's previous Fortran book on the same subject. I've seen Applied numerical methods in C by Nakamura, Shoichiro and the C codes therein are not good programming practice.

I've heard bad comments about Numerical Recipes by Press. Do you know good books on C that discusses numerical methods? It seems better for me to ask about good books on C discussing numerical methods than rather asking books on numerical methods that discusses C. I've heard about Numerical Algorithms with C by Giesela Engeln-Müllges and A Numerical Library in C for Scientists and Engineers by Lau but haven't read them.

Good books will always have algorithms implemented in the programming language in a smart way.

Thanks a lot...

Answer 1

Get a good book on numerical analysis and a good book on C programming, then use your grey cells to implement the former with the latter. On numerical analysis I like Numerical Analysis by Faires and Burden, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers by Richard W Hamming and there are a couple of books by Forman S Acton which are worth owning and reading too.

The trouble, I suggest, with a books bearing the generic title 'Numerical Methods in C' is that all you will learn from them is how to type their solutions to their problems into your computer. The aspects of numerical computation which are programming-language-specific are a tiny fraction of the whole discipline. But a book on 'Numerical Methods in C' may obscure those from your sight.

Eventually, too, you must come to grips with Numerical Recipes. Yes, it (all editions) has its faults, but it is pedagogical and the true value is in the text, not the code.

Answer 2

Hi,

Actually, I'm in a Numerical Methods course in the University of Buenos Aires. I want to bring you the suggested bibliography:

V. Chvatal, Linear programming, Freeman, 1983

G. Dahlquist, A. Bjorck, Numerical methods, Prentice-Hall, 1974

J. Dennis y J. More, Numerical methods for unconstrained optimization and nonlinear equations, Prentice-Hall, 1983

P. Gill, W. Murray and M. Wright, Practical optimization, Academic Press, 1981

G.H. Golub y C.F. van Loan, Matrix computations, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1991

B. Kernighan y R. Pike, The Practice of Programming, Addison Wesley, 1999

C. Meyerm, Matrix analysis and applied linear algebra, SIAM, 2000

J. Nocedal and S. Wright, Numerical optimization, Springer Verlag, 1999

D. Watkins, Fundamentals of matrix computations, John Wiley & Sons, 1991

Link to the page (in Spanish) :

http://www-2.dc.uba.ar/materias/metnum/homepage.html

Answer 3

N. Higham, Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms

It's a great book.