The Computational Beauty Of Nature: Computer Explorations Of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, And Adaptation

Well, I was a little disappointed by this one. I was hoping for more algorithms, maybe a little code snippets. You know what, forget about that, even a tiny hint of how to do things myself would have been great. But no, this book gives you examples in a software I don’t know, with no way to run them yourself. You don’t get to see code, you don’t get to see algorithms, just screenshots that say “See? This is a fractal!”. Wow. I bought this book to know how tho draw the fractal…..
One good point however – the book does explain some theoretical issues quite nicely.

I made a mistake in selecting my shipping address and the item was sent out to the wrong address. Another vendor I went through on Amazon refused to work with me under this scenario, refunded the cost of the item (minus shipping) and said I had to buy it all over again.

This was not the case here. The vendor was responsive, and reshipped the product free of charge.

When the book arrived it was in great condition.

The books its self is great. It assumes very little of readers initial knowledge and does a great job of addressing some complex topics. It is quite in depth and gives you what you need to implement some exciting algorithms. I highly recommend to anyone interested in fractals or complexity theory.

I recently became interested a lot in Nature. Especially, being someone in the field of Computer Science, the computational aspect. And this book is by far one of my favourite among all the “How Nature Works” kind of books I’ve read.
This Computational Beauty of Nature (CBofN) covered a lot of topics. Ranged from brief introduction to Computation Theory, Fractals, Chaos, Complexity, Adaptation. (See the Table of Content for more details).
All topics are written in surprisingly clear and very understandable manner. With as little Math as possible. (From my opinion, these topics cannot be completely understood without Mathematics — The Language of Nature). Therefore, it is also accessible to layperson.
This book does not, however, go so deep into each subject. (You won’t expect it to do that with its less-than 500 pages, don’t you? 🙂 Instead, it does give nice backgrounds, fundamental knowledge, and important ideas for each. So, if you are interesting in any of the subjects presented here, you can go on to the more specialized books on your own.
One of the nicest feature of this book, which can hardly be found in other text, is that the it does show how things work together, where and why. For example, natural phenomena like adaptation, evolution, computation, and some other things else related to each other. How can one view this from that perspective, and vice versa. etc.
One other nice feature of this book is, you can really play with almost all concepts using a number of computer programs. All the programs are downloadable (with source code, under GNU license) from the book’s homepage. So, you can reproduce almost all the figures from the book.
However, for one thing, the homepage address given in the book, in the edition/printing I have is incorrect. Maybe MIT Press had changed the structure of their website or something…
…you can still search for it using your favourite web-search engine.
About the website, all the good things are there as well, including errata. (Of course, Perfect things are very rare in Nature… So, books with some errors are ok. The thing that matter is the authors know it/admit it and tell the readers or not).
Conclusion: If you want to understand “How Nature Works” from the computational point of view. If you interested in Chaos theory, Fractals and Complexity. Then, make no mistake, you can’t go wrong with this one. (And, get the hardcover edition, because you will read it, read it, read it again, and keep refering to it. So the paperback edition probably can’t endure that 🙂
I want to give it more stars if I only could. This book will always get the highest rating possible from me wherever and whenever I review it.
Nature herself is so beautiful. So, it’s time to get to know her, to learn about her and to understand her! And this book just did it, in such a way that can hardly be better!

This is a great book but you must know that it does require some prior math experience. You cannot just jump right in without at least a basic background

Très satisfait

IMHO this book should be part of every US high school or undergradate Science/Math curriculum, and would be worth twice the price. The author’s enthusiasm is infectious, his writing style very clear, and his material well cited. He also maintains a website with free software downloads that illustrate the many mind expanding (w/o drugs! (-:) concepts discussed. Although thanks to magazines like Wired (minus its aggressive leftist politics and more aggressive BB censoring)the sciences have become “cooler.” Nevertheless, there is still A LOT of work to do, and damage to be undone, from academically inferior and unenthusiastic so called math/science “teachers” in US schools. I don’t usually rate books five stars, but I am rating this one a big FIVE stars.