History
First published in 1986, with code in Fortran (soon followed by editions in Pascal, BASIC, and C), Numerical Recipes took, from the start, an opinionated editorial position at odds with the conventional wisdom of the numerical analysis community:
| “ | If there is a single dominant theme in this book, it is that practical methods of numerical computation can be simultaneously efficient, clever, and — important — clear. The alternative viewpoint, that efficient computational methods must necessarily be so arcane and complex as to be useful only in "black box" form, we firmly reject. | ” |
However, as it turned out, the 1980s were fertile years for the "black box" side, yielding important integrated environments such as MATLAB and Mathematica that remain standards today. By the early 1990s, when Second Edition versions of Numerical Recipes (with code in C, Fortran-77, and Fortran-90) were published, it was clear that the constituency for Numerical Recipes was by no means the majority of scientists doing computation, but only that slice that lived between the more mathematical numerical analysts and the larger community using integrated environments. The Second Edition versions occupied a stable role in this niche environment.
By the mid-2000s, the practice of scientific computing had been radically altered by the mature Internet and Web. Recognizing that their Numerical Recipes books were increasingly valued more for their explanatory text than for their code examples, the authors significantly expanded the scope of the book, and significantly rewrote a large part of the text. They continued to include code, still printed in the book, now in C++, for every method discussed. The Third Edition was also released as an electronic book, eventually made available on the Web for free (with limited page views) or by paid or institutional subscription (with unlimited page views).
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