Product Description

Chapman's Fortran for Scientists and Engineers is intended for both first year engineering students and practicing engineers. This text is the most current alternative for Fortran. It simultaneously teaches the Fortran 95/2003 programming language, structured programming techniques, and good programming practice. Among its strengths are its concise, clear explanations of Fortran syntax and programming procedures, the inclusion of a wealth of examples and exercises to help students grasp difficult concepts, and its explanations about how to understand code written for older versions of Fortran.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #160945 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1008 pages

Customer Reviews

A Nice Book!
Well, I liked this book very much and therefore I want to write a short opinion/review on it (although I am short on time here and have never written an opinion on amazon before!). To put it concisely, this is a 'must have' book for any Fortran programmer. If you are shopping for a good Fortran book, this is what you are looking for! It takes you from the very first step and drops you off at a fairly high level around chapter 9. (And from where, I guess, instead of a book, you would like to consult your compiler's documentation!)

My background is in financial engineering, and I was looking for some specialized number-crunching language to write my code in (real-time models). A friend suggested Fortran, and after consulting some serious people in physics/engineering, I decided to settle on it. My problem was that there were only a handful of Fortran books here, and only that many reviews on them. So I picked this one along with METCALF/REID/COHEN's 'fortran 95/2003 explained'. And I must say that a lack of quantity was compensated for by an abundance of quality.

Chapman has also incorporated a lot of example code in this book, and that makes it worthwhile to cheat a bit before tackling a new chapter! He also stresses a lot on good programming practice, and his background makes us take his suggestions seriously. Those who work on mission-critical industrial strength code in financial industry know what I am talking about. So, if you are a newbie to Fortran, and want to learn it correctly the first time, you should consider this book. If you have a higher budget, consider METCALF et al. as an additional aid.

my 2 cents!

Disappointing as a reference
It's hard to understand who the target audience is for this book. It is so bloated with endless basic programming fundamentals and practices that the details of the Fortran language itself are hard to pick out. I first programmed in Fortran (it was spelled FORTRAN then) in 1965, hadn't worked with it for about 30 years, and - as an experienced programmer/engineer - needed to get up to speed expeditiously on current language details for a specific project. This book was not a good choice; it's huge and seems to be aimed at someone learning programming as a discipline from scratch, using, for some bizarre reason, Fortran as the 'learning language'. Given the more modern learning languages available, I can't imagine anyone actually doing this, but if there is such a person, this book is for you. As a language reference for even moderately experienced programmers it's essentially unusable. Also, the shear physical size of the paperback book (almost 1000 pages) makes it far too fragile for the constant thumbing needed to find the code syntactical nuggets buried in its depths. My volume is literally falling apart after only about 3 weeks of (frustrating) use as a reference. I've ordered Gehrke - Fortran 95 Language Guide as a replacement - hopefully a better choice.

Great overall Fortran book
This book is a good reference for programmers to have on hand and also a good book to read cover to cover to get a full understanding of fortran and its latest capabilities.