Customer Reviews

Structured Fortran 77 for Engineers and Scientists

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

 

 

I used a copy of a previous edition of this book when completing my undergraduate degree. When I had to do a fair bit of programming recently, and needed to brush up on FORTRAN, I purchased this book.

It is a simple book that outlines the fundamentals of FORTRAN. It is more of a beginners guide than anything else. The shortcoming of this book is that there is no reference or summary section of all the commands - it really isn't a desktop reference. The advantage of this type of book is the number of good examples that it contains.

I have used this book in my programming class for many years and it has proven to be reliable and well written. It has a good number of exercises and even some numerical methods applications.

Inspite of OOPS and stuff, nothing beats Fortran in writing moderately complex programs without having to learn too many constructs. I routinely handle my data files in fortran rather than go all the way writing 'C' code. Reading/writing arrays with a single statement, good math functions, universal availability etc make fortran a very good scientific tool. (more like an advanced calculator). I will rather write a small fortran program than calculate something in my head. Some scientific packages use fortran as their base language, so a knowledge of fortran is not going to be wasted. And so math/science books use fortran, so you will definitely benefit if you can understand the language. You could probably translate one of those into C/C++ and make some easy money.