RE: Book project

[Jake]

That's the point I was trying to make earlier.  I'm sure it's offensive that
Octave is always branded as a MATLAB replacement, but it's the truth.  There
are a lot of matrix based numerical packages like FreeMat, SciLab, etc., but
Octave shares enough syntax with MATLAB and is stable enough that it's
really the best replacement available.  That's how you'll attract more
users.  There are like 10s of matrix based packages out there, but Octave is
the best MATLAB replacement available.

-----Original Message-----
From: Levente Torok [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 12:26 PM
To: John W. Eaton
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Book project

Not a very recommended way but I would probably use one of the matlab books
as a skeleton in order to help people convert their knowledge or mature it
similar to the case of matlab. Not because matlab (books)
is(are) superior or no-one has the ability to write as good book as it is
for matlab but we have to agree that most people think of octave as a free
alternative of matlab. So we can honestly and humbly taking advantage of
this belief.
On the other hand I would be very happy to have a book with complex
examples.
I am also keen on seeing something about the object oriented part as well as
about the embedded C++ coding.
Any time I need to write an embedded octave function in C++ I am facing with
the lack of documentation (not autodoc generated stuff) and/or useful
examples so I usually find myself reading the source code which is already a
very complex and comprehensive.
So I would be grateful to have something easy to read about this or some
introductory to this.

Lev

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 5:39 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> I think it would be great to have books focused on Octave.  It doesn't 
> matter that there are N books about Matlab.  I think it actually 
> causes trouble for us when people use Octave but are reading books 
> about Matlab because they inevitably run into incompatible behavior 
> and the immediate reaction (based on what I see on the mailing lists 
> and in bug reports) is that Octave sucks.  So having books that show 
> Octave examples that actually work correctly in Octave should be a 
> positive thing.
>
> jwe
>
>