I'm a fan of this book since I've been using this book for a very long time. I pre-ordered the new version and got it a week ago. I think the contents are improved after I had a look at it. I'm pretty happy about that. However, the quality of the source codes, well, I have to say it is getting worse. As you may notice, authors of N.R. put a stringent license on usage of their codes, which is fine since these codes are their intellectual properties. But since they are selling their codes, they are supposed to hire some professional programmers to design a beatiful architecture, a nice data structure, and an easy-to-use interface, and implement all the algorithms with efficiency. As I can tell, C++ is abused in the 3rd version in a very bad way. I've been developing scientific computing software using C/C++ over 10 years, and I have to say the authors of the codes organized their work in a weird way. In the previous version of their codes in C++, global variables are still defined and used at so many places. Any professional programmer knows how bad such a programming style is. In this version, instead of wrapping their routines in classes, they simply use "struct" to hold global variables, does this delight you? This is just an example which upsets me. The only good thing is that they finally learned to use template...

That rarest of things, a useful and informative scientific book that's well-written. Treatment of the old topics is improved, the new topics are welcome and important, and the code is good. If you're looking for one comprehensive book on scientific computing, this is it.