“I was just going to say, when I was interrupted: : :” begins Oliver Wendell Holmes in the second series of his famous essays, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. The interruption referred to was a gap of 25 years. In our case, as the autocrats of Numerical Recipes, the gap between our second and third editions has been “only” 15 years. Scientific computing has changed enormously in that time.
The first edition of Numerical Recipes was roughly coincident with the first commercial success of the personal computer. The second edition came at about the time that the Internet, as we know it today, was created. Now, as we launch the third edition, the practice of science and engineering, and thus scientific computing, has been profoundly altered by the mature Internet and Web. It is no longer difficult to find somebody’s algorithm, and usually free code, for almost any conceivable scien- tific application. The critical questions have instead become, “How does it work?” and “Is it any good?” Correspondingly, the second edition of Numerical Recipes has come to be valued more and more for its text explanations, concise mathematical derivations, critical judgments, and advice, and less for its code implementations perse.