Introduction To Scientific Programming: Computational Problem Solving Using Maple And C

Introduction to Scientific Programming teaches beginning science and engineering students how to solve the computational problems they will encounter during their academic and professional careers. It provides a solid foundation on which students will be able to base a lifetime of learning in the sciences. This book contains a variety of features designed to help students learn how to solve computational problems in the sciences: reviews of key concepts, comprehensive sets of exercises, concepts motivated by problems, stress on problem-solving process, and all Maple and C code included on diskette. The Maple computer algebra system and the C programming language are widely used for scientific programming. One of the key aspects of Introduction to Scientific Programming is to help the student discover when to use the appropriate tool for the task at hand. No prior knowledge in either Maple or C is assumed.

"Introduction to Computational Science" was developed over a period of two years at the University of Utah Department of Computer Science in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Undergraduate Computation in Engineering Science (UCES) program. Each chapter begins by introducing a problem and then guiding the student through its solution. The computational techniques needed to solve the problem are developed as necassary, making the motivation for learning the computing alwasy apparent. Each chapter will introduce a single problem that will be used to motivate a single computing concept. The notes currently consist of 15 chapters. The first seven chapters deal with Maple and the last eight with C. The textbook will contain 20 to 30 chapters covering a similar mix of concepts at a finer level of detail.