Part II: Extending Knowledge Is Suggested Reading
Once Part I: The Complete Overview is finished, the rest of the chapters can be read in
order as a complete book or can be read in the order that most appeals to the reader.
Chapter 1: The Very Basics is designed to give you experience with typing commands in
Mathematica. Knowing what commands to use and when to use those commands will be
discussed in subsequent chapters; the purpose of the first chapter is simply to provide
initial practice and immersion in
Mathematica.
Chapter 2: A Sample Project in Mathematica is meant to show the scope of Mathematica
and how it can be applied to quickly explore a real-world problem. The goal of the chapter
is not to understand the details of the commands but rather the thought process for
building upon each step, and the process of working toward an interesting final result.
Subsequent chapters will explain the individual commands in much more detail. They will
provide the necessary building blocks of knowledge to create similar analyses while using
Mathematica fluidly and fluently.
Mathematica on the Desktop and Mathematica Online
This book is about Mathematica and is primarily written from the perspective of using
Mathematica on a desktop computer. A different product, Mathematica Online, provides a
way to use Mathematica via a web browser, and it can also be used to follow along with the
book's examples. This book is written from the perspective of using Mathematica on the
desktop, so there may be times when the process for doing something, like navigating a menu,
may not be exactly the same as the process in Mathematica Online. For cases where there are
dramatic differences between the desktop version of Mathematica and Mathematica
Online—such as working with slide shows, stylesheets, palettes and parallel computing—the
text contains notes to make the reader aware of these differences. For the vast majority of
examples, however, there will be no difference in entering the commands in Mathematica on
the desktop or Mathematica Online.
Getting Access to Mathematica
If you do not currently have access to Mathematica, you can request a trial license from
the Wolfram website at www.wolfram.com/mathematica/trial and use that to work
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