Corless R.M. Essential Maple 7: An Introduction for Scientific Programmers

Springer, 2002. - 299 p.This book contains an accelerated introduction to Maple, a computer algebra language. It is intended for scientific programmers who have experience with other computer languages such as C, FORTRAN, or Pascal. If you want a longer and more detailed description of how to program in Maple. The mathematical prerequisites are calculus, linear algebra, and some differential equations. A course in numerical analysis will also help. Any extra mathematics needed will be developed in the book.This book was originally prepared using an earlier version of Maple, but has been revised for Maple Release 7, with an eye towards changes for the next release after that. Maple continues to be an evolving system. New features will be described in the documentation for updates (?updates in Maple), and any necessary updates of the text of this book will be made available over the Web.Indeed, one reason that there was so much time between the first and second editions of this book is precisely that Maple has been evolving so rapidly in the last few years, too rapidly for me to revise this book (much less complete my others) while coping with my other duties. Maple is now a substantially betterproduct than it was, with important improvements to the programming language itself (particularly, nested lexical scopes and modules) and to the library of black boxes (particularly LinearAlgebra). This book takes complete account of these improvements: All the programs and examples and exercises in this book have been revised, many quite substantially. The former Chapter 4, which was a subject-oriented keyword summary of Maple, has been supplanted completely by the on-line help system, and therefore cut from the book. In spite of cutting that chapter, the total number of pages in the book has increased for the second edition, because much new material has been added, including an appendix on complex variables in a computer algebra context.