In his preface, the author writes “So how does this book differ from the others? The solution techniques are detailed in such a way that more emphasis is given to the concepts and rigorous mathematical details and proofs are avoided.”
That means that the techniques are given mostly by examples. The author is an engineer and this is an engineer’s book. As the table of contents shows, many methods are covered, including the conjugate gradient method, the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno algorithm, penalty functions, augmented Lagrange multipliers, sequential quadratic programming, feasible directions, particle swram optimization, simulated annealing, and ant colony optimization.
It would be best if a reader of the book is familiar with Matlab. Eighty pages in an appendix are devoted to Matlab code for various algorithms and many of the examples include the output that they provide. Users do not have to retype the code — the algorithms are available at a website.
Each chapter contains exercises, with solutions at the back of the book. Many references are provided.
The book is well produced and is pleasing to the eye. There are a few errors — problem 23 in chapter 1 asks the reader to do something with “the following system of equations” but there are no equations in what follows — but not many. The author or the publisher decided that displayed lines are not parts of the sentences they are in; I think that’s unfortunate but younger readers may not mind (or even notice).
The book will no doubt be useful to those looking for ways to find maxima and minima.
Woody Dudley’s mathematical training lies so far in the past (B. S., 1957) that he had never heard of ant colony optimization, but he admires those who can deal with it.