Fundamentals of Numerical Computation

These are source files used to generate the online text Fundamentals of Numerical Computation by T. A. Driscoll and R. J. Braun.

Installing locally

Each chapter includes notebooks that were run with Julia 1.4. They should work with any later 1.x release as well (provided dependencies honor the standard versioning scheme). To get the book functions as well as all demos, first install Julia. Then execute

] add https://github.com/fncbook/fnc

After this, hit the backspace key to go back to the main Julia prompt. This process should only need to be done once per installation. In order to use the functions you must enter

using FundamentalsNumericalComputation

at the Julia prompt in each session of Julia. After this, all the text's functions can be accessed with the prefix FNC. E.g., FNC.lufact, FNC.rk23, etc.

Startup speed

There are two sources of noticeable slowness:

1. Any using statement requires a compilation step whenever a package or its dependencies have been updated. As of July 2020, this can consume several minutes for FNC due mainly to its dependence on 'Plots' and DifferentialEquations. Even on subsequent invocations, using this package can take 10-30 seconds for loading.
2. The first plot created in a Julia session may take up to a minute, which is standard for Plots.

Both of these lag issues are well known to Julia developers and are the target of future improvements. In the meantime power users might investigate using PackageCompiler to get vastly better performance on both issues.

Tooling

The book was created using jupyter-book and VS Code with the Julia extension. These tools are already excellent and continue to evolve rapidly.

License

The content is licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, while the code is under an MIT license. All material is copyrighted.