π. π.Now, more than ever, I find myself contemplating the last two sentences from this page of Acton's "Numerical Methods that (usually) Work".
amen zwa, esq.@tpfto
πππ
I hadnβt seen it. Thanks so much mate. Love it!
And that book titleβ¦.π€£
@AmenZwa I am sure Acton knew what he was doing when he picked that book title. (In fact, in the original edition of the book, the title was ostensibly just "Numerical Methods That Work", and the "Usually" was in a faded shade of gray, like he was trying to sneak it in.)
@tpfto
Bold, that. Ya gotta love it.
Bold, that. Ya gotta love it.
Ken Butler@tpfto This is, as a whole, a pleasantly opinionated book.
@nxskok I find that Acton is a little like Velvel Kahan (he of IEEE floating point standard fame) or Edsger Dijkstra: you don't always have to agree with what they wrote, but you should at least give them some serious thought.
@tpfto my take with this kind of thing is "the author has done some serious thinking about these issues, so if I'm going to disagree with them, I'd better have a good reason".
arclight
Kernel Bob 
@tpfto Interesting book, thanks. I found it digitized on archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/numericalmethods00form/page/n11/mode/2up
@kbob I don't know how appealing it would be to non-specialists, but let me just say that it's one of the books I read because I really like reading it (e.g. I'd read it before bedtime), as opposed to just needing to refer to it for an application (though I've done that for this book, too).