It's the nature of the field that books about particular software applications can become very dated as new versions of the application are released. That's certainly the case with this book, published in 1991 and based on Mathematica v2.0. At the time of this writing, early 2016, Mathematica is now at release v10.4. Much has changed in the last 25 years. New features and functions have been added, and some older functionality has either been removed or changed so much that many of the code samples in the book will not work without significant editing and updating.

A quarter-century ago, this book was likely a great way to dig into some fundamental ideas of mathematics (complex numbers, iteration, fractals, calculus, etc.) using the symbolic programming environment of Mathematica. It would've been great for newbies to Mathematica and people with only a basic understanding of college-level math. Today, though, it's frustrating. More time is spent learning about differences between historical versions of Mathematica while trying to update the code samples to work in today's.

While reading this book was still a fun and educational, if historical, exercise, it's suffered so much from the ravages of time I can't give it more than three stars or recommend it to others. ( )