I received a negative review on Amazon. That’s always a bad thing, whether or not it is justified (see this older example). As Amazon no longer allows a reply, I’m posting it here, because other readers are probably also bothered by the way the first edition of the Python book dealt with missing subchapters and illustrations compared to the MATLAB book. And there is good news, in the second edition we have solved the problem!
Peter Jansson (without further details) has criticised on Amazon the fact that the Python version is missing some subchapters compared to the MATLAB version of the book – and rightly so! These subchapters describe methods that are based on very high-level MATLAB functions that use elaborate graphical user interfaces or require interaction with the screen. Depending on the computer platform, the latter has led to crashes and even disruption of the Python installation, which is why we could not justify recommending their use in the book.
The problem now was how to deal with the missing subchapters in the book. When the MATLAB book was written, the Python book was not planned. However, we wanted to make sure that the numbering of the chapters, the figures and all recipes / example data was the same in both books. The reason is obvious: if you want to develop and use both books in parallel, different numbering would lead to a lot of confusion. Guess what happens if you wish to use both books in parallel, as a dictionary MATLAB-Python and Python-MATLAB? You would certainly have problems using the files with different numbering in the same directory.
Unfortunately, the publisher was not prepared to simply skip the subchapters. Therefore, there are empty chapters and empty illustrations, really not an aesthetically pleasing solution – and this is probably the reason for Peter Jansson’s justified criticism. In the meantime, however, a Python Spyder fix has solved the interaction problem and many of the missing subchapters have been added. Now only some very MATLAB-specific applications are missing. Here, however, we were able to simply change the order of the subchapters so that the MATLAB book has one or two more subchapters in some chapters.
For all our valued readers, including Peter Janssen, the good news is that both books will be published in a new edition in a few weeks, and can already be pre-ordered on Amazon!
Update:
Amazon indeed accepted a review of my own book that I used to post a reply to Peter Jansson.
References
Trauth, M.H. (2024) MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences – Sixth Edition. Springer International Publishing, 520 p.
Trauth, M.H. (2024) Python Recipes for Earth Sciences – Second Edition. Springer International Publishing, 450 p.