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Numerical Linear Algebra for Programmers
- culopatin 6y agoNow even books are subscriptions?!
- fathead_glacier 6y agoThe subscription model gives you access to the drafts of the chapters and full book access at 8 months. For $9 at the lowest subscription grade this is $9x8 = $72 which seems like a fair deal to me when going through amazon for similar subject titles. My experience of speaking with authors who have published books is that most of the money stays with the publisher and not the author which is a real pity. The net effect is the discouragement to write books which is counter to progress. The subscription model is really interesting to me and I hope it makes a difference to the book publishing paradigm.
- dTal 6y agoSurely the issues of "publisher as middleman" and "book-by-subscription" are orthogonal?
- dragandj 6y agoYes, but the main goal of these subscriptions is to fund my work on the free open source libraries related to the book. You get the book, AND the active development of the libraries.
- enriquto 6y agoI would only buy the book if you put the pdf freely downloadable on your website (I systematically do that to support authors, because I love "dead trees").
- cyberdrunk 6y agoBest books are often written by academics, who get paid to work on them by their university. The royalties are just some nice extra income.
- devnonymous 6y agoWeren't they always ? ...if you consider editions. Which essentially is what the author's promoting - access to draft editions (and presumably updates, post-release -- this wasn't clear).
- theshadowknows 6y agoExactly. Books have always been subscription based. Difference is it’s not monthly. But for that monthly subscription you get so much. Plus the good feels knowing you’re supporting some great open source work.
- throwgeorge 6y agolol weren't the original subscriptions newspapers e.g. serial distributions of books like david copperfield?
- dragandj 6y agoAuthor here. Please consider an alternative viewpoint: you can try the book draft for $9, and if you don't like it, just don't continue subscription. Total cost: $9. If you like the book, please consider that 100% of the book proceeds go towards the development of related free open source libraries https://github.com/uncomplicate https://github.com/uncomplicate
- KallDrexx 6y agoI've bought plenty of MEAP books at Manning that were incomplete. The difference is that I only had to pay the $30-40 (normal book price) one time and never think about it again, and new revisions would just be delivered to me. There have been several early access books where the author needed to take a (well deserved) break, or be slow at delivering new chapters because of other revisionary work. This has sometimes meant a few months without new content, which I was OK with in that model. In this model I could easily end up spending way more than than that, and every month I have to make a decision if it's worth cancelling. Not only that you have another book on there that's "early access too" so you are juggling two books (and books are not trivial things to write and get finished/polished). So how am I to expect you'll get either done in a reasonable time. So sorry, I'd be happy to give you a flat $30 for early access to the book and full access to the ebook when it's finished, but I'm not going to subscribe and hope it's in a good state prior to reaching that point in monthly fee. This is despite I think this book is very much what I'm looking for as I'm wanting to get into 3d graphics, but I'll pass.
- iamcreasy 6y agoI've bought early access book from Manning as well, and after few months of silence the author decided to drop the chapters that I was looking forward. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
- tinnet 6y agoweird game theory view here, would you not be incentivized to never finish the book because people might be waiting for that 1.0 moment to cancel their subscription?
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- dragandj 6y agoPart of my Interactive Programming for Artificial Intelligence book series. The companion book in the same series: Deep Learning for Programmers: An Interactive Tutorial with CUDA, OpenCL, DNNL, Java, and Clojure https://aiprobook.com/deep-learning-for-programmers/ https://aiprobook.com/deep-learning-for-programmers/
- Already__Taken 6y agoI saw a great talk explaining linear algebra where the presenter used it to solve the angles of an arm joint to place an animated robot arm at a specific co-ordinate. I think it might be this actually, can't watch it all right now to check. Demo I'm thinking of should be https://youtu.be/3v75aX5-gSA?t=1436 https://youtu.be/3v75aX5-gSA?t=1436
- sabas123 6y agoIs there some sort of preview material? I am always quite skeptical about mathematics through programming books, so it would be nice to get a feel for it's rigor.
- 99_00 6y agohttps://aiprobook.com/downloads/lafp-sample-vector-spaces-0.1.0.pdf https://aiprobook.com/downloads/lafp-sample-vector-spaces-0....
- benstrumental 6y ago> no C++ build hell > no C++ syntax hell! > no C++ at all!!! The author of this book has some strong feelings about C++.
- abjKT26nO8 6y agoI sympathize. Yours truly, C++ dev at work PS. HN formatting is a devil.
- orange3xchicken 6y agoThe two classic graduate texts for numerical linear algebra are Matrix Computations by Golub and Van Loan and Numerical Linear Algebra by Trefethen and Bau. The reference you are looking for (includes executable C++) is Numerical Recipes by William Press et al. There are a couple other good ones as well that are more broad - e.g. Quarteroni, Sacco, & Saleri Numerical Mathematics also covers numerical diffeq, convex geometry, & approximation theory. I can't comment on how OP's book fits in.
- jlebar 6y ago> The reference you are looking for (includes executable C++) is Numerical Recipes by William Press et al. I bought this book hoping it would be to floating point what Hacker's Delight is to integers. It is not that. I'm not really sure what it is. Most of the numerical algorithms I wanted weren't included at all. Those that were, like random number generation, were out of date and covered with much less rigor than you can find online with some Googling. IIRC their algorithm for generating a random float in the range [0,1] is just wrong. The book does indeed include executable C++. But the C++ it includes is a travesty. It's C++ written by someone who sort of understood C. Anyway I did not like it. :)
- scottlocklin 6y agoTrefethen&Bau, Golub & Van Loan and Demmel's "Applied Numerical Linear Algebra" make up the holy trinity. I don't know what audience the OP book is supposed to serve, but it's evident on inspection; it ain't me.
- bhattisatish 6y agoThe book looks interesting and the associated libraries (neanderthal for e.g.) But while going through your performance comparison [1], I feel something is off. I am not that familiar with libpython-clj and how it works, but looks like you are loading python from within the JVM and in turn the python is loading the C++/fortran OpenBLAS libraries to get the numerical calculations done for the Correlation Coefficient. I suspect this multi-level indirection is creating it's own performance overhead. For now, I don't believe the performance benchmark are telling us the true story :-) But after saying all that, I love how concise is the clojure implementation is. [1] https://dragan.rocks/articles/20/Clojure-Numpy-Cupy-CPU-GPU https://dragan.rocks/articles/20/Clojure-Numpy-Cupy-CPU-GPU
- gandreani 6y agoThe follow up article addresses this concern. Similar results https://dragan.rocks/articles/20/Clojure-Numpy-Cupy-CPU-GPU-2 https://dragan.rocks/articles/20/Clojure-Numpy-Cupy-CPU-GPU-...
- scottlocklin 6y agoYeah, well, that's a nonsense comparison: the neanderthal package is freaking lapack (in C++), and they used a java trick to get Clojure fast on it (basically run the C++ on allocated unmanaged memory blobs, which is the only marginally sane thing one can do in a language like Clojure). I wrote an early version of this in Clojure before throwing my hands up at the atrocity of doing this sort of thing. They also wash over very obvious (to anyone who knows how a computer works) issues with using Cuda and Clojure numerics in general. Misleading and Fail statements. If the whole book is filled with such chirpy and wrong assertions, they should fall on their swords for offending their numeric linear algebra forefathers and the shame of it all.
- deltasquared 6y agoIt lost me at no C++ at all.
- ramosu 6y agoNo way.. After backing and not receiving Punk Mathematics since 2010, I realized paying for something unfinished makes absolutely no sense at all. I prefer to pay more and get something complete.
- dragandj 6y agoJust to clarify: the book you backed and got burned with in 2010 has no relation to this author nor this book.
- Insanity 6y agoGood comment, my initial thought after reading the parent was that it was by the same person.
- goostavos 6y agoAgreed. I backed an 'alpha' book 3(?) years ago now. First 2-3 chapters were pretty good. Unfortunately, those first few chapters were all I ever got. The book never advanced beyond that... so.. money not well spent. I'm now in the boring "I give you money, you give me finished product" camp.
- dragandj 6y agoClarification: the alpha book you're referring to is not connected to me nor this book.
- goostavos 6y agoWhaa? I know you are not the person who made the book I was talking about. I was agreeing with the other comment that, having been burned by 'alpha' books in the past, I'm disinclined to use the model again in the future. I similarly feel the way about video games. I'd rather pay for a finished product than a speculative one.
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- arcturus17 6y agoI have to echo what others have said: great book idea, but not so hot on the model. I studied linear algebra in college and I could use a refresher for AI, but I don’t want to study math in the traditional way, with convoluted abstract examples that lead nowhere. Hated it back then and hate it now. The prospect of doing it in code makes it infinitely more exciting so you’ve definitely got something going on there there... However, I’m not going to get into another subscription, mainly because I don’t want to check every month to see the state of the project. I’d personally pay you around $40 for an early access fee that also gets me the final product... It’d be a discount from your target price but I’d also be taking a risk (what if you don’t finish it?). I’m favoriting this and will check how it evolves. Worst case, I’ll buy the finished product if the reviews are good!
- dragandj 6y agoSure! You'll be welcome.
- arto 6y agoYou may be looking for this book: https://www.manning.com/books/math-for-programmers https://www.manning.com/books/math-for-programmers
- arcturus17 6y agoThat looks great, thank you. I’m actually tempted to buy it - have you worked through it?
- KallDrexx 6y agoThis looks perfect for my case. I think I"m going to order this, thanks!
- chongli 6y agoI don’t want to study math in the traditional way, with convoluted abstract examples that lead nowhere Have you checked out Gilbert Strang's lectures [1]? They're definitely geared toward numerical/applied linear algebra rather than theoretical/abstract. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UJ4CFRGd-U&list=PLE7DDD91010BC51F8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UJ4CFRGd-U&list=PLE7DDD9101...
- augustt 6y agoDoes this include "traditional" numerical linear algebra (e.g. stability, conditioning) or is it the modern deep learning interpretation that linear algebra ≈ matrix multiplication?
- the_svd_doctor 6y agoFor a great introduction to numerical linear algebra, I cannot recommend enough the book from Trefethen and Bau. Or Golub & Van Loan, if you like pain.
- jeffreygoesto 6y agoHahaha, your username checks out! I can second those recommendations.
- nextos 6y agoI don't like Strang books that much as I find them a bit verbose, but his latest one is geared towards machine learning and it's pretty good: http://math.mit.edu/%7Egs/learningfromdata/dsla_toc.pdf http://math.mit.edu/%7Egs/learningfromdata/dsla_toc.pdf He covers some numerical linear algebra, and he spends a lot of time on topic modeling and deep learning.
- enriquto 6y ago> I don't like Strang books that much as I find them a bit verbose I'm not sure I agree with you. I remember his elementary calculus book, where he states and proves the fundamental theorem of calculus on the first two pages (including the definition of derivative and the definition of integral). He says something like "this is not a car analogy, this is the real thing and we are already done, the rest of the book is just minor details and examples". I do not know how you can be more concise than this, considering that half of the first page was taken by a cute drawing of a speedometer and an odometer. That you call verbose?
- signa11 6y agotwo different books, just like people, can have two different styles right ?
- smoyer 6y agoI think there's a misspelling on your pitch page - "aren’t these two frends adorable? the book is too!"
- mkagenius 6y agoI am trying to read Axler's book and it is proving to be extremely boring to me (no offense to the author) but this post gave me an idea that I should probably explore a linear algebra library along with the book to make things interesting.
- enriquto 6y agoI also find Axler unbearable. If you are interested specifically in matrices, the book by Denis Serre is quite a masterpiece. And if you are interested in numerical linear algebra, the book by Tim Davis "Direct Methods for Sparse Linear Solvers" is also extremely beautiful and readable (the goal is not the software implementation in itself, but most of the presented algorithms are illustrated by pseudocode, and some of them even in C).
- ceo_tim_crook 6y agolooks good but I'm not paying monthly for a book, if it ends up on leanpub or amazon I'll buy a copy though
- floatingatoll 6y agoMy interpretation of this subscription landing page was that I could preview a few pages from the book to see if the writing style worked for me. I wasn't able to figure out how to do so, as the 'AVAILABLE' link next to the linear algebra refresher simply went to a Patreon page full of locked/unavailable posts. This looks like it could be nifty, but the ultra-polished marketing is too focused on paid conversions and doesn't meet the basic necessaries of "Is this content valuable to me?".
- dragandj 6y agohttps://dragan.rocks https://dragan.rocks and also the Downloads section of the https://aiprobook.com https://aiprobook.com