Numerical Recipes is a single volume that covers very broad range of algorithms. Unfortunately that format skewed the choice of algorithms towards simpler and shorter early algorithms which were not as accurate, efficient or stable as later more complex algorithms. The first edition had also some minor bugs, which were fixed in later editions; however according to the authors for years they were encountering on the internet rumors that Numerical Recipes is ""full of bugs"". They attributed this to people using outdated versions of the code, bugs in other parts of the code and misuse of routines which require some understanding to use correctly.