Subject: Numerical Recipes in C - now available online

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 15:02:52 +0200 (IST)

Check:

http://www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/Numerical_Recipes/bookc.html

It says there that:

<<<
Permission is granted by the copyright owners for users of the World Wide
Web to make one paper copy of these PostScript files for their own
personal use. Further reproduction, or the extraction of, or copying of,
machine readable files to any server computer, is strictly prohibited.
This on-line resource is not intended as a substitute for purchasing the
book, or for obtaining a license for the use of Numerical Recipes source
code.

Everything is in PostScript files or PDF ones.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 23 Jan 2002 22:29:07 -0500

> Everything is in PostScript files or PDF ones.

Not surprising. My guess is the authors got tired of TeX/LaTeX and
possibly troff (in the academia - at least Bill Press and Saul
Teukolsky - both astrophysicists) long before Word became usable (to
the extent it can be called usable now).

Another consideration: it is well known in the publishing world that
TeX and troff produce book quality results, while no WISIWYG tool
does. Some 8-9 years ago many publishing houses dealing with
professional literature (notably Kluwer) started accepting and
encouraging LaTeX submissions of books and magazine articles, with
freely available macro frameworks. It allowed them to dispense with
galley proofs. I used to write my articles this way (when I was busy
publishing what I did).

Now, I just picked up my battered copy of Numerical Recipes In C from
the shelf and opened the Acknowledgements. To quote (hope it does not
break the copyright):

"We prepared this book for publication on DEC and Sun workstations
running the UNIX operating system, and on a 486/33 PC compatible
running MS-DOS 50/Windows 3.0. <...> We enthusiastically recommend 
the principal software used: GNU Emacs, TeX, perl, Adobe Illustrator, 
and PostScript."

[Dated: June 1992.]

Should you be surprised?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
If it aint't broken it hasn't got enough features yet.