Math Toolkit for Real-Time Programming (Paperback)

Topic: Embedded Systems Programming

Author: Jack W. Crenshaw

Key Benefits:

• Do big math on small machines
• Write fast and accurate library functions
• Master analytical and numerical calculus
• Perform numerical integration to any order
• Implement z-transform formulas

Need to learn the ins and outs of the fundamental math functions including square root, trig functions, logarithms and exponentials? Renowned columnist Jack Crenshaw explains them all in painstaking and loving detail and gives you ways to calculate them in the most efficient ways possible, to any desired degree of accuracy your computer will support.

Read this book, and you may never have to copy someone else’s software again! You won’t just get algorithms; you will learn how and why they work from first principles. The author gives alternative approaches (including some you may never have thought of), explores the advantages of each, and ends each discussion with practical, robust, and extremely efficient software.

You get a Fog Free explanation of calculus that anyone can understand! If you never really understood calculus before, you will after reading this explanation. Starting from first principles of areas and slopes, Crenshaw covers both analytic and numerical calculus, literally from A to Z.

Turn the principles of analytical calculus into fast, accurate and practical numerical methods for all occasions. The author will lead you from the simplest numerical methods to the best and most accurate in existence, carefully explaining each step along the way. Learn single-step and multi-step methods, difference methods, Runge-Kutta integration, and z-transforms. Convert formulas from the continuous-time to discrete-time domains, and back again.

Even more fun and enlightening than his columns! Whether or not you are among the thousands of the author’s devout column readers, you will appreciate the perspective and entertainment value of his trademark personal experiences, anecdotes, and motivations. And when you realize how much he has expanded the scope of his column analyses, the background behind them, and the never-before-published methods that he has included in this book, you will appreciate why it was so long in the making.

Jack Crenshaw holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Auburn University (specialties in math, electronics, and advanced dynamics). He wrote his first computer program in 1956 and his first microcomputer software — a real-time, floating-point, Kalman filter-driven controller — in 1976. He has been working with real-time software for embedded systems ever since, and thinks he might be beginning to get the hang of it. He is currently a Senior Principal Design Engineer for Alliant TechSystems, Inc., a contributing editor for Embedded Systems Programming magazine, and author of the popular "Programmer’s Toolbox" column. In his spare time, he likes to dabble in compiler theory, guidance and control theory, and help rehabilitate orphaned and injured wildlife.