Criticism
An early reviewer wrote, "The phrase 'numerical recipes' is bound to send the shudders down every honest numerical mathematicians spine.". He also praised, however, the authors' readiness to "go out on a limb and present their own opinions". Given the editorial style of the books, it is not surprising that they were (and to some extent remain) controversial within the numerical analysis community. Early criticism centered on the books' assumed unreliability (the First Edition indeed contained some mistakes), the exclusion of some algorithms, and the authors' implication, not always correct, that their programs were as efficient and reliable as "black-box" libraries, for example the NAG Numerical Libraries. Although not mentioning Numerical Recipes by name, Whaley et al. demonstrate that LAPACK with a highly optimized BLAS library can be an order of magnitude faster (or more) than textbook-style triply nested-loop linear-algebra routines similar to the code in Numerical Recipes. As another example, Frigo and Johnson point out that the fast Fourier transform (FFT) code in Numerical Recipes is 5–40 times slower than highly optimized programs on modern computer architectures.
A second line of criticism centers on the fact that, although printed in the books, the code is copyright by the Numerical Recipes authors, and not freely available for use under a GNU General Public License or similar open license. Indeed, one early motivation for the GNU Scientific Library was that a free library was in part needed as a substitute for Numerical Recipes. The Numerical Recipes authors have been unapologetic to this criticism. They derive income from selling individual and corporate licenses to the code, and clearly consider the Numerical Recipes enterprise as a business.
A third line of criticism centers on the coding style of the books, which strike some modern readers as "Fortran-ish", even when the actual coding language is contemporary, object-oriented C++. Some of this criticism is undoubtedly true, and due to the legacy history of parts of the code. However, the authors have defended their style as necessary to the format of the books, requiring a very terse coding style because of space limitations and for readability.
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