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I have books written about Mathematica Version 2. Yes, they are old (like copyright 1991).

How much has Mathematica changed since then, and is this kind of information too outdated to be useful?

m_goldberg
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  • How much has Mathematica changed since then It changed by a lot. Version 2 had 350,000 lines of code and 883 functions. Recent versions have about 5,000 functions and may be between 5-10 million lines of code. There is a lot of new functionality added since version 2. But I think the core language itself has not changed too much. Just many more functions added. – Nasser Mar 28 '19 at 03:32
  • Some functions have been removed, a lot has been added, but the core principles should still apply (e.g. avoiding loops in favor of listable functions). Have a look at this list of incompatible changes, where there is the claim "…almost any program written, say, for Mathematica Version 1 in 1988 should be able to run without change in Mathematica Version 7—though it will often run considerably faster". – J. M.'s missing motivation Mar 28 '19 at 03:43
  • I have a small disagreement with @Nasser. I think Version 6 made a very big change to both the internals and the user interface by changes to the kernel and the front-end. It introduced both a whole new way of handling graphics and dynamic updating of objects. This started the phasing out of developing GUI with Java and replacing it wit totally native GUI tools. Version 7 introduced multiple kernels and a raft of function to support parallel processing. – m_goldberg Mar 28 '19 at 03:53
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    @m_goldberg raises one of the more significant changes: the old system was based on PostScript, while versions after 6 use a completely overhauled graphics system (which, among other things, allows the user to interact with 3D objects). – J. M.'s missing motivation Mar 28 '19 at 04:03
  • This page http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/quick-revision-history.html shows what changed in each version. – Nasser Mar 28 '19 at 05:15
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    I would not recommend learning from such an old book. There are plenty of free quality resources for recent versions. Start with modern books/tutorials, then once you got the hang of the basics, you can read the old books too. They will definitely have useful information. But you should not base your learning on them. They should only be a complement to up-to-date resources. – Szabolcs Mar 28 '19 at 17:06
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    Just to give a taste of what v2 does not have: Split, Element, Sow, Total, Tr, NumericQ, or even just .nb-style notebooks. All of these were already fundamental, commonly used operations pre-v6. – Szabolcs Mar 28 '19 at 17:17

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