Due my writing an exam on numerical analysis I had the pleasure to look through lots and lots of books on numerical analysis, and here is a list of my favorite ones so far:

• Afternotes on Numerical Analysis & Afternotes Goes to Graduate School by G. W. Stewart
  Both books are very readable and introduce many of the concepts in a light way that builds an intuitive understanding for them.
  It's possible to read the books cover to cover in a few days and you can learn a lot very quickly.
  They are also quite amusing:

  "In the nineteenth century the Norwegian mathematician Niels Abel showed that no polynomial of degree five could be solved by a finite number of additions, multiplications, divisions, and root extractions. If we had a finite algorithm for finding eigenvalues of general matrices, we could apply it to companion matrices and make a fool out of Abel. Abel was no fool."

• Numerical Linear Algebra by Trefethen
  another very good book which I haven't used much personally, though
• Numerical Methods by Kelley
  contains an okay introduction to CG and GMRES.
• Numerische Mathematik I & Numerische Mathematik II
  are very good books, too. The first volume contains a good introduction to everything but ODEs and PDEs and the second volume consists of a very thorough overview of numerical algorithms for differential equations, including a nice introduction to the general theory of their solvability etc
• Numerical Analysis by Burden and Faires
  a very nice book that contains lots of visualizations and covers many topics

More to follow soon

Last week I had to give a presentation about Rigid Body Motion (ie the basics of rigid body physics and some general mechanics).

Here are two versions of my presentation (one with less text and one with more):

Rigid Body Motion Presentation as PPTX; Rigid Body Motion Presentation as PDF
Rigid Body Motion Full Version as PPTM; Rigid Body Motion Full Version as PDF

If you are truly interested in learning about rigid body physics, here are some books/links:

• “Technische Mechanik 1 & 3” by Gross, Hauger, Schröder & Wall
• “Physically Based Modeling” by Pixar (SIGGRAPH 2001)
• “Mathematics for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics” by Eric Lengyel
• “Physics for Game Developers” by David M. Bourg
• “Game Physics” by David H. Eberly
• Chris Hecker's Rigid Body Physics page

Cheers,
Andreas

Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture - A System of Patterns (PoSA I)

I've finally finished Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture - A System of Patterns and I want to say a few words about it.
First I don't think, it's a must-buy. It's okay to read (but more about that in a minute) and certainly it can come in handy to look up patterns while developing, but if you have small budget, it's better to get it from a library.

The book can be roughly divided into 4 parts: architectural patterns, design patterns, idioms, "trivia".

The chapter about architectural patterns is the most interesting,  where as the chapter about design patterns is okay, too, but also borrow or expands upon lots of concepts from the GoF book. The idioms chapter only contains one idiom (think small, language-specific "design pattern", e.g. reference counting in C++).
The "trivia" part contains information what pattern are, who came up with the idea, influences, the community, yada yada. The most interesting topic being the community and links in there.

The book itself is quite boring to read and the patterns are described in endless detail, which is good, if you want to look things up and avoid common mistakes. On the other hand this makes it a book, you should not read front to back, because it doesn't really make sense and you won't get a lot out of it either. (I actually read it front to back, and from that experience I draw my advice ) Just skim over the patterns, until you find something you don't know and then read the paragraphs that are interesting until you think you understand the pattern and then read some more to verify that you really understand it, but you can probably skip 40% (or more) of the text, if you just want to learn about new patterns and not go into all the details.

Next I'll try to write a few words about each pattern (so I´ can look up the pattern here instead of in the book)´.

Note: I just found an awesome page, http://vico.org/pages/PatronsDisseny.html, that contains information about all patterns in the book, so it doesn't make sense for me to write about each and every one of them.

Architectural Patterns

• Layers
  more »

  To sum up 20 pages: it's good to use a multi-layered architecture in your software.

• Pipes and Filters
  more »

  This is something Pragmatic Programmer mentioned, too: Use and support the usage of your tools through pipes and filters. This is mainly something that is common on Unix, but it's incredibly useful and if you support some standard text I/O helps interoperability with little cost.

• Blackboard
  more »

  Finally an interesting pattern, it's also described in Pragmatic Programmer, but you can read the description here, too, because it's a quite interesting pattern.

• Broker
• Model-View-Controller
• Presentation-Abstraction-Control
  more »

  This one is interesting and worth having heard of. It's similar to MVC above, but more general.

• Microkernel
• Reflection

Design Patterns

• Whole-Part
• Master-Slave
  more »

  Anyone who has ever done parallel programming with MPI has used this pattern extensively

• Proxy
• Command Processor
  more »

  A more elaborate version of the Command patten in the GoF book

• View Handler
  more »

  The pattern describes how to design a document/view manager

• Forwarder-Receiver
• Client-Dispatcher-Server
• Publisher-Subscriber

Idioms

• Counted Pointer

Now that I'm done with this, I want to share a few useful resources mentioned in the book:

• http://www.hillside.net/patterns - contains some useful links
• http://www.c2.com/ppr/ - contains a few pattern descriptions

Personally idioms are very interesting for me, too, because the day-to-day coding work is in a specific language and idioms are exactly about that.
A little googling already turns up lots of useful sources. For example:

• http://users.rcn.com/jcoplien/Patterns/C++Idioms/EuroPLoP98.html
• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/More_C%2B%2B_Idioms

There are a few more pattern books that I plan to read, so let's see how that turns out..

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

This is an awesome book, that explains a lot about how to write research papers and also about all the little details you should pay attention, too. It's a good read - I spent 1.5 hours a day for a bit more than a week to read through it - and I think it's going to be quite useful, when I start writing my Bachelor Thesis in a few days.

I'm currently writing some ANTLR grammar and StringTemplate stuff and I might write something about that, too, on the weekend.
I'm not sure I'm really happy with ANTLR, but it's probably the best thing out there at the moment, but I'm totally in love with StringTemplate, even though you might say it has some rough edges, too.
But more on that on another day.

Over and otu,
Andreas