This is very much a book for students who need to know about this area of mathematics. It covers its subject area well. The authors assume that the reader will know enough programming in some appropriate computer language. However the authors give Maple, C++ and Java as their examples of suitable languages. I am not going to dispute the suitability but there Maple is rather different from the other two. The end of chapter programming exercises can vary from trivial to hard depending on which language is being used.

If you are a student you will probably have relatively little choice when it comes to a textbook. If you have decided to spend time on a self-study course your problem will be that you will need to find someone to mentor you because this is a tough subject and it would be easy to go astray. If you are responsible for selecting a textbook for a University course on this subject, this book would be worth considering.

While the authors claim a degree of language independence, you should note that the book comes with a (120-day trial) copy of Maple software. Even the student licence is $125 for a download version and you are not going to finish this book in 3 months (unless you are a very dedicated student). While the programming exercises can be done in almost any computer language, the authors generally expect you to be using Maple and that is the language they use for examples.