Part I. Why Good Computations Go Bad
Simply copying formulas out of a math or statistics textbook to plug into a program will almost certainly lead to wrong results. The first part of this book covers the pitfalls of basic numerical computation.
Chapter 1 discusses floating-point numbers in general and how they're different from the real numbers of mathematics. Not understanding these differences, such as the occurrence of roundoff errors, and not obeying some basic laws of algebra can lead to computations that go bad.
Chapter 2 looks at the seemingly benign integer types. They don't behave entirely as the whole numbers of mathematics do. Arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication take place not on a number line, but ...
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