Math Toolkit for Real-Time Programming [With CDROM]

Book is good and useful. Rational fraction, Numerical intergration, dynamic simulation and state vector cover in detail. Appreciate your selling. Contacted customer service for missing CD-ROM attached with book on 2/17/2006, contact person, Durga.A. Yet to receive reply.

Math Toolkit for Real-Time Programming is simply the best focused book on the subject of doing maths on microcontrollers, eg PIC 8051, AVR, PSOC etc with limited resources. If you write software for an 8 bit micro's then this is the book for you. As it is writen if you want a canned answer then this has less value, but if you want to learn how then this is for you. It has also been helpful to demistify some math concepts that I never really "got" even after doing an electrical engineering degree!

Run, don't walk to get this book! Remember that numerical analysis class you took, in which you came away really understanding nothing besides how to plug-and-chug? Those "black box" numerical integration routines with "magic" coefficients that came from who knows where? Did you ever get the relationship between z transforms and "backward differences?" This book explains all this and more in a clear, readable, and dare I say, even entertaining presentation (I read it in one sitting cover-to-cover, which is typically impossible for a technical book.) Over the years, I've purchased quite a few technical reference books. Most seem to be weighty self-congratulatory monuments to the authors' personal ability to present fantastically-terse-yet-look-how-rigorous mathematical proofs. Maybe 1 in 100 is actually written in a down-to-earth, accessible way without pages of dense jargon and overly complicated formulations. "Math Toolkit for Real-time Programming" is simply the most well-written numerical programming book I've ever come across, and perhaps one of the best technical books on any subject, period. I wish all books were this readable. Do yourself a favor and get this book ASAP. ------------- 2008 Update: As I go back and read this review 6 years later, it sounds a bit over the top, but I _still_ really like this book. It's rare to find a technical book that can communicate the "common sense" behind mathematical concepts and algorithms without requiring the reader to have a Math PhD. Does the book address every possible topic in numerical computing? No, it is not a comprehensive reference, but the topics it DOES cover are very well explained indeed. I DEFY you to find a better explanation anywhere of the basic techniques used in numerical integration. I just wish Dr. Crenshaw would write more books and explain other stuff I use but never really "got" in EE class. A few of the reviewers complained about the relative uselessness of the included programming material -- I would say their comments are largely on target (although the author clearly states that the purpose of the material is to illustrate the frequency of "gotchas" in even the most simplistic of programs); however, the true value in this book is not the programming examples, it's the insight given into the techniques. Dr. Crenshaw has a passion for communicating the intuition behind the methods (I also encourage you to check out his columns in Embedded Systems Programming.) Finding someone who can pull that off successfully is rare. The numerical techniques he discusses (doing raw math without the benefit of library routines) are broken down to their basics and completely described in a manner I have seen in no other book. The reason I wrote this review is because I _understood_ a lot more after reading this book than any others covering similar material (Acton; Ralston & Rabinowitz; standard BSEE/CompSci textbooks etc).

If like me you need to take control over the math library that comes with your compiler then this book is for you. Whether you need more speed, more reliability with a total understanding of what's going on inside your code this book is for you. It is definitely on my top-five for embedded engineering. This is pretty much the stuff they don't teach in university but makes a trememdous performance difference at the project level. Do yourself a favor and get this book, even if it's just for reference... you will need it soon!

Nice reference for embedded system programmers If you have the last 10 years of Embedded Systems Programming magazines, then you will already have 80% of the basics covered in this book, but the book is a great reference to read and have handy. Material is expanded and well written, so I'd recommend it for any one working with embedded control systems.