PHYS 3730/6720	Introduction to Computers in Physics		FALL 2006

This is an evolving list of reference books which you may find useful. An asterisk indicates that the reference will be placed on Reserve at the Marriot Library.

An important textbook (though not required!) is Numerical Recipes in C++, by Press et al. (Cambridge University Press), listed below. All students who plan to do any amount of scientific computing or numerical data analysis are strongly urged to obtain this book. In a somewhat odd switch, you may obtain the book itself for free, on-line. However, you must purchase the book to obtain electronic copies of (and rights) to the many pieces of C++ code discussed therein.

The complete list of references is as follows:

General computational physics:

Landau, R. H. & Páez, M. J. 1997 Computational Physics : problem solving with computers (New York: John Wiley & Sons).

* Press, W. H., et al. 1988, Numerical Recipes in C : the art of scientific computing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Data analysis techniques for physics:

P.H. Bevington and D.K. Robinson, Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences (2nd Edition, McGraw Hill 1992).

Unix:

* Abrahams, P. W. & Larson, B. R. 1992, Unix for the Impatient (Reading: Addison-Wesley).

Programming languages:

Kernighan, B. & Ritchie, D. M. 1988, The C Programming Language (Englewood Cliff: Prentice Hall).

Oualline, S. 1995 Practical C++ Programming (Cambridge: O'Reilly & Associates).

Wall, L., Christiansen, T., & Schwartz, R. L. 1996, Programming Perl (Cambridge: O'Reilly & Associates).

Document Preparation

Buerger, D. J. 1990, Latex for Engineers and Scientists (New York: McGraw-Hill)

* Lamport, L. 1986, Latex : a document preparation system (Reading: Addison-Wesley).

Last updated: Mon Oct 30 01:28:11 MST 2006