These topics were rarely taught with a unified perspective, and, somewhat surprisingly, this remains true 30 years later. As a result, some of the material in this book can be difficult to find elsewhere—in particular, techniques for updating the LU factorization, descriptions of the simplex method applied to all-inequality form, and the analysis of what happens when using an approximate inverse to solve Ax=b.
Numerical Linear Algebra and Optimization is primarily a reference for students who want to learn about numerical techniques for solving linear systems and/or linear programming using the simplex method; however, Chapters 6, 7, and 8 can be used as the text for an upper-division course on linear least squares and linear programming. Understanding is enhanced by numerous exercises.