I think that criticism of Numerical Recipes is still fair. Most of the topics in this book are the subject of decades of research hundreds of papers. Expectin

I think that criticism of Numerical Recipes is still fair. Most of the topics in this book are the subject of decades of research hundreds of papers. Expecting all this to be condensed down to a few pages with the 'good enough' answer is unreasonable. Before the internet and the wide availability of good software packages (say in the 1980s), I could see the appeal to the practicing scientist or engineer. My boss wants the inverse of a 3x3 matrix -- I'll use Numerical Recipes. Today, anyone wanting to implement any of their algorithms is wasting their time -- excellent tested code already exists and may already have bindings to their language (e.g., numpy/scipy). The real problem with this book is it is sometimes the first and only introduction to applied mathematics. I first saw it in 2005 as an undergraduate physics major. Later, when I mentioned to my applied math PhD advisor, he was appalled. I was at first surprised by his response, but after finishing my PhD program and spending a few years in the field, I agree with him. Unfortunately, applied mathematics has not produced a competing generalist manual to the breadth of our field. In part, this is because the field is large and complex; to even understand the basics of modern algorithms requires a level of mathematical sophistication not taught in undergraduate math (see, e.g., GMRES). There are good books that cover specific topics in Numerical Recipes, e.g., Trefethen's Spectral Methods in Matlab and Trefethen and Bau's Numerical Linear Algebra, but they (rightfully) don't provide a pithy answers as to which algorithm to use. These books showcase different algorithms and illustrate the situations where they are or are not appropriate. This latter part requires significant significant sophistication to understand. Implementing an algorithm, easy. Choosing the right algorithm; aye, there's the rub. And that is where Numerical Recipes fails.