Are you interested in purchasing David Wagner's "Power programming with Mathematica"?

Question

I recently contacted McGraw-Hill to see if they have a mechanism in place for printing out-of-print books that are still of interest. Specifically, I asked about "Power programming with Mathematica" by David Wagner, as I am personally interested in obtaining a copy, and suspect that others might also be interested.

Here is the literal response I received from McGraw-Hill:

Good morning Todd,

If there was a high enough demand for the book there is a possibility. If you can let me know how many you're looking for, and the name of the school or business you're with I can contact the editor and check to see if there's something that can be done.

McGraw-Hill Education

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First, please don't get your hopes up, as nothing may come of this; however, I am committed to seeing this through if there is sufficient community support to get the publisher to make it available again, if only for a limited time.

If you would be interested in purchasing a copy of Wagner's text, please respond in the affirmative by making a comment to this question, such as "yes, I would like to purchase a copy." In this way, I can directly "show" our community's interest to the publisher.

At this time, I can't speak to cost, but it is clear that we need a "critical mass" to get the publisher's attention to make it worthwhile. Keep your fingers crossed and show your support!

Answer 1

To download a licensed copy of Power Programming with Mathematica by David B. Wagner, please click here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j2dsyvptnxjd369/Wagner%20All%20Parts-RC.pdf

Thank you to McGraw-Hill for granting me the license to scan and distribute this out-of-print text to the Mathematica community!

Thank you to Manfred Plagmann (aka matariki) for taking the time to carefully scan the entire text.

Thank you to Sophia Scheibe (aka halirutan's wife) for providing select scans of pages to Manfred to allow him to complete his work.

Thank you to Mr. Wagner for writing this text!

Happy computing everyone! Todd

Answer 2

Exciting news!

After nearly two months of agonizing communication, McGraw-Hill has granted me a license to scan one copy of "Power programming with Mathematica" for the purposes of distributing it (freely) throughout the Mathematica user community here on StackExchange.

First, thanks to everyone for showing support on this .... sorry it took so long.

Secondly, to make this a reality, I need to make contact with someone who is willing to sacrifice an original copy of the text (in good condition). It will be necessary to scan the entire book into a PDF file, and then I am required by the licence agreement to add author & publisher credit information to each page - which I know how to achieve using desktop publishing software that I have.

In the second answer to this question above, a user named Matariki had stated that he had received permission to bulk scan a copy of the book. Does anyone know how to get a hold of him? If anyone else is interested in making this sacrifice for the user community, please contact me at my email address: [email protected]

Thanks, Todd

Answer 3

I have packaged the electronic files that came on the original floppy and posted them in a ZIP archive on my web site, at: http://www.verbeia.com/mathematica/PowerProgMa.zip

File size is 119 kb.

Sorry for the delay. Enjoy!

Answer 4

Update (01-11-2013)

1. I've contacted McGraw-Hill and was able to talk to one of the original editors involved in publishing this book. His response is that McGraw-Hill does not have the electronic (i.e. PDF) files necessary to offer this text again by print-on-demand. If the electronic files existed, they would be able to do it, but they can't because the book was published too long ago (1996).

2. The editor did mention one possible solution to the problem: As a community, we could request permission from McGraw-Hill to photocopy the text (with a potential, as yet unknown fee attached) for our user community. Assuming McGraw-Hill gave permission, we would need someone in our user community that own's a copy of the text (in good condition), and is willing to take on the work of photocopying and distributing it. In essence, users would get a photocopied version suitable for placing in a 3-ring binder. I am willing to help coordinate the effort, but I don't own a copy of the text for photocopying purposes.

So, this brings up more questions:

A. Is there still interest among the users here to request permission from McGraw-Hill to photocopy the text? (I have the contact information to make the request on our behalf.)

B. Does anyone own the text who is willing to be involved with the photocopying and distribution of it?

Sorry I don't have more satisfying news at this moment. If you are still interested, please respond to Questions A & B in the comments section.

Answer 5

I have scanned today an randomly chosen page (157) from the book to get a first feeling of how to tackle the problem. I ran it through the OCR software that comes with the VueScan scanner application. I had to use a rather high scan resolution of 600 dpi to minimize recognition errors. Has anyone experience with some better OCR software than those freebees that come with scanners? The recognized text file is below:

Pattern Building Blocks 1 57
That got rid ofthe constant diff[3 x"2 - 2 x + 1, x]
term in the previous result. 2
-2 diff[x, X] + 3 diff[x , x]
The derivative of X’ is n2("1. Note that the use of “n_ . ” for the exponent means that
the first parameter also matches the expression xx
diff[x_"n_., x_] /; FreeQ[n, x] := n x"(n - 1)
Sofarsogood... diff[3 x"2 — 2 x + 1, x]
-2 + 6 x
but diff doesn't work on diff[(x + 1)"2, X]
expressions of this form. 2
diff[(l + x) , X]
We need to implement the chain rule. Below, fx is a mnemonic for “function of x.”
diff[fx_"n_, x_] /; FreeQ[n, x] && !FreeQ[fx, x] :=
n * fx"(n - 1) * diff[fx. x]
diff[(x + 1)"2. x]
2 (1 + x)
diff[(x"2 + 2 x + 1)"3, x]
3 <2 + 2 X) (1 + 2 X + X2)2
Chain rule seems to eliminate the need for the power rule, so we might try to UnSet
the latter:
Note that I0 UnSet 3 ru|e, diff [x_"n_, , x_] /; FreeQ [n , x] =,
the left-hand side must be
typed verbatim, including 7 diff
conditions. G loba 1‘ di f f
diff[(c_)*(f_), x_] /; FreeQ[c, x] := c*diff[f, x]
diff[(f_) + (g_), x_] := diff[f, x] + diff[g, X]
diff[c_, x_] /; FreeQ[c, x] := 0
diff[(fx_)"(n_). x_] /:
FreeQ[n, x] && !FreeQ[fx, x] :=
n*fx"(n — l)*diff[fx, x]
Unfortunately, our rules now leave out one important case: diff [x , x] .
diff[(x"2 + 2 x + 1)"3, x]
3 (1 + 2 X + X2)2 (2 diff[x, X] + 2 X diff[x, X])
This is easily fixed by the following simple rule:

There are still a few misses. In particular the ^ is interpreted as ". Exponents of output cells end up somewhere else etc. The annotations Wagner uses on the left margin are also, as expected, interspersed with the following line. However, after deleting all output cells it was a matter of a few minutes to clean up the page and recreate the output cells. Certainly possible to do and the result will be much more useful than a photocopy.