Chaos: Making a New Science, by J. Gleick, is a required book for this course (it may or may not yet be in available at the SU Bookstore.) This book is written at the "popular science" level and does not contain mathematical details. It does, however, communicate many of the main conceptual ideas and experimental background for the scientific study of chaos.

During this semester, I will be developing a reader for this course. I will hand out excerpts from others, web references, and my own summaries as we proceed, in class. This will comprise a major portion of the total reading, along with Chaos.

I will also hand out copies of the PowerPoint slides displayed, for you to ADD your notes to. The slides themselves are insufficient for notes, but are meant as an aid to you.

www.vpython.org

Contains documentation for VPython (a tutorial and more detailed doc,) downloads for your computer, etc.

www.python.org

Resources for Python programming. Includes a link to the next item:

Toying with IDLE

A gentle introduction to IDLE.

MATLAB references:

MATLAB documentation pages - www.mathworks.com/support/product/ML/.

BOOK: "Learn to Program Using Python: A Tutorial for Hobbyists, Self-Starters, and All Who Want to Learn the Art of Computer Programming", by Alan Gauld (approx. $23)

I almost made this a required text, but learned about it too late. This is for people who have not programmed before - it goes through the ideas at a good pace for such people. THIS BOOK HAS BEEN ORDERED AND WILL BE PLACED ON RESERVE IN THE LIBRARY.

BOOK: "Practical C Programming", by S. Oualline

An excellent book to learn C programming from. (Most useful for PHY607.)

BOOK:"Numerical Recipes in C", Press, Flannery, Teukolsky, & Vettering, Cambridge University Press.

This book has some useful numerical algorithms and discussions of these algorithms. Much of the code is not state of the art, and the array indexing is contrary to usual conventions. We will cover many fewer topics than are covered in this book (most useful for PHY607.)

BOOK: "C - A Reference Manual", Harrison & Steele, Prentice-Hall.

A very useful reference manual for the C language, if you need it. Not an introductory book. (Most useful for PHY607.)