The book consists of 21 chapters which present interesting applications implemented using the LabVIEW environment, belonging to several distinct fields such as engineering, fault diagnosis, medicine, remote access laboratory, internet communications, chemistry, physics, etc.
The Ptolemy Project is indeed a study of models of systems. The systems, however, are quite different from the ones I focused on in the past. Those were given to me by nature, but the ones in this book are created by humans. In this book, the purpose of modeling is to improve systems, and there is nothing I could have done to improve the planetary system given to us by nature.
The mechanistic myth is the belief that everything can be described as a neat hierarchical structure of things within things. And few of us realize that our entire culture is based on this fallacy. While the world consists of complex, interacting structures, we prefer to treat every phenomenon as a simple, isolated structure.
What you are reading is the first of what I hope to be many everimproving iterations of a useful C++ textbook. We’ve gone fairly quickly from whim to print on an all-volunteer basis, and as a result, there are many things that I’d add and change if I had an infinite amount of time in my schedule. The vast majority of the contents were wrien in less than 36 hours by 25 students (mostly freshmen!) at Norwich University over a long weekend. Some of it is mine, and some was added by our crack team of technical editors as we translated sleep-deprived poor grammar into sleep-deprived beer grammar.