Reader reviews

This is the one to get if you are serious about kinematics.

I picked this up after getting stuck on a project and it turned out to be exactly the right book at the right time. The exercises at the end of each chapter are worth doing — they caught a few misconceptions I did not know I had. The explanations are careful without being condescending, which is a difficult balance to strike. Some terminology is introduced without much ceremony; I had to look a few things up along the way. An easy five stars from me. I look forward to whatever the author writes next.

The clearest explanation of computational biology I have come across.

I was looking for something that would bridge the gap between tutorials and proper reference material, and this does that well. The author clearly knows the subject deeply and has thought hard about how to teach it. It is denser than the page count suggests, and I found myself slowing down around the middle. This is the book I wish had existed when I started working with computational biology.

Better than I expected. Rare to find a technical book this well judged.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. The writing is direct and does not waste space on filler, which I value in a technical book. The chapters on mathematics are the strongest — the examples are stripped down but complete, and I could follow along without constant guessing. If you have the prerequisites, this is an easy recommendation. I will be keeping it on my desk rather than the shelf.

An enjoyable and informative read, though it could have been shorter.

This is the third book I have read on 3d graphics this year, and it is comfortably the best of them. Some of the material is available elsewhere, but rarely presented this clearly. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. Worth picking up if you already have the basics. Set realistic expectations and you will get a lot out of it.

Three stars feels about right. Useful, but not essential.

I had been on the fence about this one for a while, and I should have bought it sooner. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. Useful as a reference, less so as a straight read from cover to cover.

A useful guide. The examples assume a particular environment, but that is fixable.

I picked this up after getting stuck on a project and it turned out to be exactly the right book at the right time. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. A couple of chapters felt like they could have been merged, but that is a minor complaint. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. Worth picking up if you already have the basics. Set realistic expectations and you will get a lot out of it.