Hands-on Start to Wolfram Mathematica 
and Programming with the Wolfram Language

Cliff Hastings
Kelvin Mischo
(Michael Morrison)

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Basic Structure

A bit about us

The goals

The evolution to creating a book

The process of writing / editing

The book itself

Marketing / sales

Lessons learned

A Bit About Us

Education

Cliff

Monmouth College - small private college background

used several different softwares for different classes (very confusing and never learned any of them)

not a programmer; math/chemistry background; no programming experience

Michael

Illinois Wesleyan & Illinois State University - small college & larger university

used Matlab, Maple, Mathematica all quite a bit and felt comfortable with them

bachelors and masters in CS; knows lots of programming languages

Kelvin

University of Illinois - large university experience

used Matlab, Maple, Mathematica all quite a bit and felt comfortable with them

psychology & engineering backgrounds; diverse knowledge of a large set of tools and languages

Job Histories at Wolfram

TimelinePlot[{{Interval[{{1997, 1, 1}, {2015, 10, 1}}]},{Interval[{{1998, 1, 1}, {2015, 10, 1}}]},{Interval[{{2006, 1, 1}, {2015, 1, 1}}]}},PlotLegends->Placed[{"Cliff Hastings","Kelvin Mischo","Michael Morrison"}, Below]]

MathMobile (Cliff)

my approach led to a positive or negative experience for visitor

so many different learning styles; couldn’t overwhelm but couldn’t dumb down Mathematica either

Tech Support (Michael)

majority of questions fit into two categories:

one-off, highly technical questions that resulted into discussions of hardware issues, a potential bug, etc.

entirely common questions that led to pointing to FAQs

Customer Service (Kelvin)

the day to day interactions with the company

learned how passionate users are, impatient if operations of Mathematica weren’t right, like a password

testing of User Portal, simplify installation process, especially site license renewals

Sales (All)

although we took entirely different starting points at WRI, we all ended up in Sales together

focused in on a specific problem - lots of access to Mathematica; not near enough understanding or usage of Mathematica

Our Wolfram Goals

Three steps to wide-spread usage

need people to be able to have repeatable statement about Mathematica (what is it and why do I care)

need people to not think of it only for a few tasks (graphics, symbolics, calculus)

need people to actually use it (and not just appreciate it)

The Solutions (evolution to the book)

Step 1: Repeatable statement

Created "the tech talk"

everyone loved it and thought it was easy once we showed them our approach to use

saw the big-picture value; lots of repeatability of value statements outside of graphics, symbolics and calculus

“This completely erases my long-standing belief that Mathematica is too difficult for our students.”

removed the perception problem; didn’t fix the wide-spread use issue (learning hurdle)

Step 2. Get existing people to use it for more than calculus

Hands-on start video series

if you’ll teach with Mathematica, we’ll give you these free videos to teach your students Mathematica

if you see the vision, we’ll teach you how to get started for free

several hundred thousand views

“I’ve wanted to teach with Mathematica for years but I didn’t want to be the person teaching Mathematica.”

people loved them, but they were a “watch it once and done” medium

several requests for book versions for longer-term usability

Step 3. Get new types of people to use it

We needed a book

how to make it interactive and accessible for a wide audience

how to capture the “comforting voice” behind the videos

cater to the person brand-new to Mathematica and the bigger audience of non-programmers

how to make assignments for faculty to utilize

Creation of the HOS book

Creating unified chapter structure

text explanations

examples

author’s suggestions / notes

assessment questions

Agreeing on the audience

first-time user of Mathematica

or, someone who hasn’t used Mathematica for quite awhile

anybody at any level (student, commercial, high school teacher, junior college, government, etc)

special attention was taken to ensure a non-programmer could comfortably use and learn from this book

Division of labor

Kelvin & Michael were the authors / creators

I did the story telling, problem sets and just generally was bossy

lots of sharing documents, ideas (Dropbox, paper, email, midnight chats, etc)

Working with Wolfram Media

put together basic proposal and discussed with Stephen & Andre

they agreed to the value and resurfaced Wolfram Media

I acted as the primary legal contact; set up LLC and negotiated contract with Wolfram

Michael acted as the primary production contact; worked with editing, publications and graphic design

had a couple of collaborative meetings on book cover and a few nuances; perfectly painless

The Three Pillars of Hands-on Start

Grab reader’s interest right away

Slow build-up of material

Full scope of Mathematica, not one application

Grab reader’s interest right away

Chapter 1:  The Very Basics

make sure readers actively do something right away

Chapter 2:  A Sample Project in Mathematica

show what’s possible after being proficient in Mathematica

motivates readers to spend time on syntax conventions

Slow build-up of material

Chapter 3:  Input and Output

explain the different types of input and how they fit together

Chapter 5:  Fundamentals of the Wolfram Language

syntax convention tips, presented as time-savers

Chapter 20:  Data Filtering and Manipulation

Part by example, build-up for Select

Full scope of Mathematica, not one application

Hands-on Start list of chapters

Foundation for use of Mathematica for lots of projects

Marketing / Sales

Marketing

Free Hands-on Start training courses

ran 6 free training courses for BTS

1800 attendees; 4600 registrants (41%)

64% students; 22% academics; 8% hobbyists; 6% commercial

~60% had not used Mathematica prior to the class; ~25% had not installed Mathematica prior to registering for the class

65% US; Germany, UK, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Spain, South Africa & Ecuador were other primary countries of attendance

Sales

Amazon

sold out twice (and almost again)

working on more international presence

Post-Sales

Created a unique code on each book

free training class

answer key to problem sets

allows for understanding of use in the market

Feedback

"I received my copy of the book today and it is already my favorite book on the subject of the several books on Mathematica that I have purchased in the past year (or two - since I have been using Mathematica). Congratulations to Cliff, Kevin and Michael."

"This book is a much-need complement of existing support material for Mathematica in particular and Wolfram technologies in general. It puts to rest once-and-for-all the frequently heard claim that Mathematica is difficult and not accessible to the school and college levels of our computational universe. Good luck with the publication."

Lessons Learned

collaboration & passions were key

we took longer than necessary (let’s wait until the new version so we can show xxx, and we were very careful to not take work time - so loads of evenings and weekends )

make sure the code isn’t hidden like it’s Fort Knox

task someone as the driver of the project to maintain vision and deadlines

it can be perfect - but you won’t print it until 2050 so aim for almost perfect

determine pricing strategy early (it dictates a lot of the decision-making down the road)

have the e-book timeline in mind in tandem with the printed book