Michael Trott's GuideBooks are an invaluable reference for the serious Mathematica programmer. The unsurpassed symbolic computation engine, superior programming paradigms, lightning-fast numerics, and state-of-the-art visualization can justly be considered four of the main pillars of the Mathematica system, and Michael Trott, himself a well-established and renowed expert programmer at Wolfram Research, provides the most in-depth coverage available in these areas. Unlike the contents normally to be found in a numerics book, this numerics GuideBook includes several methods and principles from other fields of mathematics and programming. This GuideBook is truly astonishing in terms of its breadth. The material is highly relevant for the ambitious numerics programmer, and the writing style is very readable, fluent, and consistent. The structure of the material is logical and break-free, and the examples are very well-chosen.
Several elucidating examples also further the knowledge about the mathematical or physical subject matter itself. Just to mention a few, I was amazed to discover that magnetic field lines of stationary flows are NOT closed in general, and some examples of modern mathematics and physics literature are used in contrast to classical physics, such as the continuous time random walk on a graph or quantum carpets in a solution, which provides an interesting classical vs. quantum variant. And next to textbook examples the reader will find many "real life" examples interspersed throughout the book as well, which makes the results quite "tangible".
Michael Trott includes a great comparison of Mathematica's superior compilable machine precision arithmetic (bytecode, instead of machine-code compilation), high-precision arithmetic, and interval arithmetic, all three of which are needed frequently depending on the numerics project at hand.
Needless to say, the book shows a profusion of carefully chosen graphics that help understanding the matter or result instantly. Here Michael Trott's expert ability as a graphics programmer is indispensible.
All references are hyperlinked through their respective DOI numbers. The DVD contains the texts and inputs of the other three GuideBooks as well.