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1 comments about MathLink: Network Programming with Mathematica.

1. For those who know Mathematica well, and who also want
   to call Mathematica programs either remotely or from
   programs not written in Mathematica, this book is the
   canonical reference; in fact the only one that I am
   aware of other than the documentation that comes with
   Mathematica. The material in tbe book goes far beyond
   what can be found in the documentation however. As the
   authors observe, writing programs from scratch using
   the TCP/IP protocol can be formidable, and so MathLink
   was invented to ease the process for those who do not
   want to become expert in TCP/IP. Readers will also
   have to have a working knowledge of the C programming
   language.

   The book covers the Windows. Macintosh, and
   Unix platforms, with LINUX emphasized for the latter.
   Since all three of these operating systems are covered
   in the book, this makes navigation in it a little
   annoying at times. It does expand on the actual
   evaluation process when executing a Mathlink program,

   and how Mathlink does type conversion. Latency issues
   in the network will of course have to be dealt with in
   using Mathlink. The authors devote a chapter of the
   book in dealing with data transfer times across a
   network. They are also wise enough to know that the
   data transfer is best done with functions written in C
   for situations that are time-intensive. Readers just
   need to remember to call the Install function after
   each change they make to the .c and .tm files, as this

   fact is not emphasized by the authors.
   A chapter is devoted to the debugging of
   programs written in MathLink. The ability to debug
   these programs is really because of the underlying C
   code rather than Mathematica, for the latter does not
   of course have a debugger. The authors also illustrate
   real-time graphics with TurtleGraphics, which is based
   on the graphics primitives of Logo. Although somewhat
   antiquated, it was put in to allow simulations of
   cellular automata that are done in the next chapter.
   Transfer times in the performing of real-time graphics
   are reduced by employing color tables. For those
   working on MAC OS or Windows machines, a discussion of
   the digitizing of movies is given using the QuickTime
   movie player. These discussions of real-time graphics
   are generalized to interactive graphics in the next
   chapter. This discussion is particularly enlightening,
   since it deals with how to implement object-oriented
   programming in Mathematica. Interestingly, objects are
   thought of as function names when sending messages to
   them. This is an illustration of the classic "message-
   passing" paradigm in object-oriented programming, with
   the messages being send to objects as their function
   arguments. The authors discuss the class method and
   instance method; the latter being the collection of
   definitions that make up the class. Single and
   multiple inheritance, a very important feature of
   object-oriented programming, are discussed, and the
   authors show how to create an event-driven mechanism
   using Mathlink. Most interestingly, they show how to
   create a window object, and this leads to a detailed
   discussion on how to write a real-time interactive
   graphics system. The latter is not supported by the
   Mathematica front-end, and so for readers interested
   in creating these for purposes such as curve-fitting
   to data, their discussion is very helpful.

   In addition, for those involved in large-scale

   team efforts in writing Mathematica applications, or
   programs calling Mathematica, the authors show how to
   use Mathlink to communicate between different
   Mathematica sessions. They discuss briefly the use of
   J/Link to enable users to write Java programs to call
   Mathematica programs, thus exploiting Java's
   portability capabilities.

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