1 comments about An Introduction to Fortran 90 for Scientific Computing.

1. While written in 94, Fortran is so stable that this book should still be useful to anyone desireous of learning the language. Ortega explains that there is still a pervasive need for Fortran programmers. True in 94 and 06.
   
   The book is somewhat short, compared to a text on Java or C#, say. This reflects Fortran's pedigree. A simple language that lacks any graphics or object oriented ability. Most of the book covers Fortran 77, with its later sections explaining the improvements in Fortran 90.

3 comments about Structured Fortran 77 for Engineers and Scientists.

1. 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.



2. 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.



3. 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.

1 comments about Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulations And Their Statistical Analysis: With Web-based Fortran Code.

1. The book is best suited for those actually using Fortran. The Markov chain examples of Monte Carlo runs are well explained. Hopefully, the reader should not have any problem with the concepts. Of course, the actual runs are very compute intensive, but that's why you need a computer.
   
   If you are coding in another language, the book can still be of use. The algorithms are the same, of course. You'll have to manually recode the examples in your language. But the core of the algorithm implementations is relatively small. Shouldn't take too long.

1 comments about Introduction to FORTRAN 90 (ESource Series).

1. Written at a level for 7 year olds. How dumb are our college students, or how dumb are these teachers ? The first chapter talks down to the reader and explains what a byte is ! Then goes on to explain that older verions of FORTRAN exist ! Almost no coverage of the advanced features of F90, although the chapter on recursion is worth reading. Anybody want to buy my copy ?

1 comments about Digital Visual FORTRAN Programmer's Guide (HP Technologies).

1. This is not really a book to learn Fortran from. It spends relatively little time on the language itself. Rather, it is devoted to showing how to compile and run Fortran code under a Microsoft operating system and development environment.
   
   Lots of grubby fiddling around with DLLs, as you might expect. And the IDE does not seem as nice as others for C# or VB. But perhaps this should not be surprising. The latter languages are far more heavily used on Microsoft machines, so the company concentrates its support there.

3 comments about Introduction to FORTRAN 90 for Engineers and Scientists (Prentice Hall Modular Series for Engineering).

1. This book is quite appropriately named. It teaches the reader Fortran 90 in a clear, concise, and logical manner, exactly as an Engineer or Scientist would expect. This book goes a step beyond teaching Fortran by trying to teach the reader good programming style, common algorithms, and logic traps to avoid. Most all the examples relate in some way to problems commonly solved by Engineers and Scientists, thus showing how using the language can benifit and enhance the readers professional cababilities. However, this book does have its downfalls. A couple of the code examples have small errors in them, and certain topics are not covered as well as others. Overall, I believe this is an excellent book that does a great job of teaching the reader to program in Fortran 90.



2. I needed a book to get up and running in my new job as a Fortran programmer. This was just the book to do that! My job is in the engineering field and the book not only covered code that pertained to engineering concepts, but it also covered the necessary code and syntax that I was likely to encounter in the custom-built program that I will be maintaining/enhancing. It was just the right amount of delivery without being too much--enough to get my skill set updated. I would buy it again. It was worth every penny.



3. "Introduction to FORTRAN 90" will get you on the road to programming in FORTRAN 90 post haste. The foundations of the langauge are covered thoroughly and clearly with plenty of good examples.
   
   But FORTRAN 90 is a big language and it is not well served in this rather limited volume. Much that is useful and important in FORTRAN 90 you will find no mention of here. If you are doing some serious real-world programming, you will outgrow this book in, I predict, less than three months.
   
   Maybe this is a good buy if you know flat nothing about the language and want to start learning. But mind your budget, because if you continue FORTRAN90 programming you're going to need something better before long.

1 comments about Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN Example Book: The Art of Scientific Computing.

1. This is really a great book of numerical examples. It teaches you on how to use those "abstract" numerical recipes. From here you will be a good commander of both numerical recipes and numerical programming. You will learn a lot of practical experience. You can not miss it! enjoy it.

3 comments about Numerical Recipes in Fortran 90, Vol. 2.

1. This is one of the greatest advances in numerical analysis of the 20th Century, and a "can't do without" in the computer age. However, I bought a personal copy in 1991 and the quality of the binding was terrible as pages have kept falling out in the most frequently used sections. It's one of the books I'll take to my grave, if it doesn't die before I do. I think the publishers should be ashamed of themselves for not treating such a great classic with more respect.



2. This IS NOT a standalone book. It can be read ONLY with NR f77 (2. Ed. also titled Volume I). The discussions on the algorithms given there are not repeated here. The few new recipes (eg on random numbers using a lot of f90) are explained in the excellent style one has come to expect of the authors. However to make sense out of the book you must have both this and the volume 1 open at the corresponding pages. This makes it inconvenient to use. For this reason it was something of a disappointment.

   The cleanliness of the code in the recipes (as expected from the authors other recipe books) and the introductory chapters on f90 and parallelization still make the book worhtwhile.

   I think I would have given the book more stars if my expectations (based on previous version) were not so high.




3. Although the original FORTRAN77 version of Numerical Recipes is highly acclaimed (and rightfully so, it is really worth every buck) I do not recommend this FORTRAN90 book. I was very disappointed when I received it. A huge part of the book only contains F90 program listings for the same routines that are derived and discussed in detail in Volume I (F77). The two new introductory chapters make it not worth buying the book. Instead, get the Numerical Recipes CD-ROM which includes the source code for C, F77, F90 and other languages and maybe a good introductory or reference book on F90.

   (The review of "oblinqued" down below is obviously referring to the original book as the F90 book was not available in 1991).

1 comments about FORTRAN 90 for Scientists and Engineers.

1. It has been many years since I did Fortran programming, but once I decided to get involved for professional reasons, this was an excellent choice.

   The author slowly and extremely methodically exposes the reader to the Fortran 90 language with what I will coin "computational motivation." Simply stated, just when the chapter gets you thinking about "how to...", BANG, Brian Hahn begins to address that very issue with source code and explanations! I cannot say enough about this book for the beginner or intermediate level Fortran programmer. Please, do yourself an enormous favor if you are interested in using this extremely powerful (and fairly simple!) numerical language for engineering, science, applied mathematics and even financials...take a look at this text on the subject!!

2 comments about Introducing Fortran 95.

1. If you have never programmed, this might be an o.k. book. If you know already some other languages as I do you'd probably better of with some other text. I for myself feel like I wasted my money on this book. It is full of typos and has certainly not been proofread. For example, I found a passage explaining a particular programming example misplaced in an entirely different example. Some example programs have obvious mistakes and typos, which makes me wonder if all of them have ever been tried by the authors. The index has very limited use and in one instance pointed me to a page that is entirely wrong. Sometimes a programming example introduces a feature or syntax that is (intentionally or unintentionally?) not explained in the main text. The authors spent great effort on selecting witty quotes from the literature for every chapter. I wish that they had expended that effort on a more concise and correct content.

   "Introducing Fortran 95" is clearly not a reference book. I believe that "Fortran 90/95 Explained" is probably a more useful book for most programmers even though I haven not even read it yet.




2. I bought this book to do exactly what the title says, to be "introduced to Fortran 95". The book starts by describing what a computer is, and on the next page discusses "implicit initialization of derived type objects". Where is the intermediate material??? In addition, the authors of this book might know the Fortran language, but they certainly don't know the English language. There's at least one typo on each page. Also, as stated in another review, the sample problems have errors. I found it difficult to learn from this book, and i'm going to throw it out and buy another one to use. I couldn't find the answer to any of my questions in this book, instead, I've had to play around with the example programs to find the authors' errors. Carelessly written book.