Customer Reviews

Fortran 90/95 Explained

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There are two types of essential books to be on your bookshelves. Books to learn from and books to reference.

This book is the essential reference. Once you learn Fortran, this is the book to turn to when you need to know the details of the language.

I find myself using this book over and over again for my research project. It's short, concise, absolutely accurate and complete, making it the perfect book to have right next to your keyboard.

In response to the 1 star review, this is _not_ the book to learn the language from if you know nothing about Fortran, but it would be a serious mistake not to stock your bookshelf with this gem of a book.

In my opinion this book gives a thorough, yet concise account of the Fortran 90 programming language and its more recent Fortran 95 revision. Its virtue lies in its unambiguous definition of terms, programming constructs, function definitions etc. It is ideal for the experienced programmer who wants to know how to code a specific task in Fortran 90. It is most definitely not suitable, nor aimed at either the novice programmer or the programmer of the Fortran 66 era; both of whom need a slower, more example and algorithm driven, introduction to the Fortran of the 90's.

I have successfully used this book for teaching, but only to experienced Fortran 77 programmers eager to learn about the new language, and with the aid of highly structured lectures and supervised computer tutorial sessions. I would not recommend it for student self study.

As an experienced programmer, what I most like about this book is that I can look up a term in the index, be referred to a small number of entries in the text, and rest assured that in those few pages I have all the information I require on that topic. Other Fortran books I have read frequently do not document, or pay scant regard to, important features of the language such as optional arguments to I/O statements or generic function disambiguation.

If I were only allowed to keep just one Fortran 90 text book this would be the one.

For the experienced FORTRAN 77 programmer, this is the best book you can own for learning FORTRAN 90/95. Don't be fooled by its unimpressive size, the content is what's important and the only metaphor I can find is this: the contents of this little jewel are like concentrated acid. I'm not at all surprised the authors of Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN 95 site this book as their favorite reference. This book is not for the faint at heart, but then, what successful programmer is? This rare jewel combined with Adams, Brainard, Martin, Smith, and Wagener's "FORTRAN 95 Handbook" is all the aspiring FOTRAN 90/95 programmer needs.

One example of the many gold nuggets I found in this title that I could find mentioned almost nowhere else: Instead of declaring a function as EXTERNAL so that it may be used as an actual argument in a procedure reference, Metcalf and Reid recommend using an interface block in the scope of the procedure reference using the actual function name, and a similar interface block in the referenced procedure (using the dummy argument procedure name), thereby allowing the compiler to envoke all the checking associated with explicit interfaces. Using the EXTERNAL attribute for this scenario does not allow that depth of checking, and, indeed, Chapman makes it seem as if the EXTERNAL statement is required to pass a function name as an actual argument. Adam's et al write that the use of interface blocks makes this use of EXTERNAL effectively obsolescent (p 473).

I did have one problem with my edition of "FORTRAN 90/95 Explained", the index was bound incorrectly (the pages were out of sequence).

If you are new to Fortran and learn by doing, this is not the book for you. It is difficult to find explainations in one location. For example, when writing out a variable to the screen, you may want spaces put into the output. Where do you find the "coding" for spaces? Well, it's hidden very well in an example 20 pages later from the original text on the "write" statement. Also, I am currently writing code and need to use the 'call' statement. Unfortunately, something as useful as the call statement is hard to find in this book. I have had a difficult time using this book as a reference without having to spend a lot of time going through the whole chapter to find the information I needed. Maybe it just needs to be organized differently.

I learn by looking at other people's coding and interpreting and investigating. This book does not lend itself very well to that type of method. Maybe it works for pure programmers, but I am an engineer and need results quickly. I hope this review helps you.

Fortran 90/95 explained by Metcalf and Reid is a reference work that covers systematically all the fundamental concepts in the Fortran 90 and 95 programming language standard. The text is concise, yet it is sprinkled with examples. I consult the book often and usually find quickly what I am looking for.

I bought this book because it was much cheaper than the other titles. Unfortunatly I got what I paid for. It just briefly mentions new features, and if you don't already understand them, you are lost.