Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Author: David M. Bourg, http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/702 Booksite: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/excelseckbk/index.html $45 USD,  $63 CND, £32 GBP, 40€ EUR Published: January 2006. Pages: 442 ISBN: 0596008791 Requirements: Microsoft Excel. Visual Basic for Applications. (For Macs go to http://www.realsoftware.com/.) For folks who already know how to do math. Strengths: Lots of recipes that work in Excel. Weaknesses: None found.

Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook by David M. Bourg is well, a cookbook for showing how to use the mathematical functions in Excel by the scientific and mathematical communities as a “poor-boy” option to developing using either FORTRAN, Matlab or Mathematica.

If you only use about 5% of Excel’s capabilities and don’t do much more than simple spreadsheeting, you don’t need this book. If you are into complex formulas and functions, than this book has quite a few recipes to choose from to help you get your work done.

This book opens up those usually hidden resources for importing and analyzing data pr performing calculations or solving science and engineering problems.

David Bourg has captured a number of examples from various disciplines such as biology, chemistry and physics.

Each entry follows a Problem – Solution – Discussion format that makes it easy to quickly get up-to-speed.

There are instructions on maximizing 3D charting and statistical analysis, working through Fourier Transforms, visualizing vectors, manipulating matrices and even getting into multivariable calculus.

The last chapter digs into financial apps that reminded me of HP programming books for the early hand calculators.

There are 14 chapters on Visual Basic apps, manipulating data, charting, statistical and time series analysis, mathematical functions, curve-fitting and regression, numerical integration and differentiation, solving ordinary and partial differential equations, performing optimization analysis and financial calculations. There is no Appendice.

If you want Microsoft Excel to really jump through hoops, why not look at what is done here instead of reinventing the wheel?