Publisher: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math
Authors: Stephen J. Chapman Stephen Chapman
List Price: $96.25
Amazon Price: $96.25
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Reviews:
Summary: Good for beginners and transfers
Despite some of the negative comments on this book, I bought it anyway. The remarks that this is not a reference manual is unjust. Chapman never claims that the book is supposed to be a reference manual, so don't expect one. The book is written for those who begin to learn Fortran 95 or want to upgrade their skills to make the transition from Fortran 77.
The build-up of the book is excellent. After every Chapter I had the feeling I learned something new, and understood how the Fortran 95 features would help me code more efficiently than in Fortran 77 (which I have done for about 20 years). The exercises and examples help a lot in that direction and I really appreciate the way in which Chapman uses real-life problems, like sorting names or phone numbers, or small physics problems.
It has been said in reviews that the index is marginal, but that is clearly fixed in the Second Edition (the index is 20 pages long). Another suggestion that the examples are too simple is also unjust. I've learned quite a bit from them. Don't forget that it is no use to make the examples and exercises so difficult that they become untractable.
On the critical side I can add a few items of discontent:
- There are quite a few typos and errors in the book and despite the reference to the publishers website where errata should be found, that website doesn't even seem to know that the Second Edition exists. All the material there is for the first edition.
- I do not see the use for providing flowcharts AND pseudo code next to the actual Fortran 95 code. The pseudo code is so much like the real code that it is just a waste of space. Flowcharts would suffice.
- Chapman gets a bit repetitive at times. At the end of each Chapter it repeats the "Good practices" and the newly introduced commands and statements basically verbatim from earlier in that Chapter. Also each Quiz quite annoyingly starts with the sentence "This quiz provides a quick check to see if you understand the concepts introduced in this section......"
Overall "Fortran 90/95 for Scientists and Engineers" lives up to its title. Assuming that Fortran 95 is mostly used by scientists and engineers this is a really good book to start learning Fortran 95. At the end of it you will be able to write efficient and correct Fortran 95 code.
Summary: Excellent text for modern programming
It is outrightly silly to rate this excellent book one star and insinuate that it is a terrible write-up. Is it the thin index that makes it so bad, or the explanation of do loops using sin(x) series expansion, according to the first reviewer? If you are a scientist or an engineer (the target audience of the book) you'll probably see the wisdom of such an example instead of counting from 1 to 10 as if we are inside a grocery store.
This is an excellent book not just for sake of learning the fortran language but also for writing modern and easily maintanable codes and algorithms. Whether you are a "pure" or "hybrid" programmer, you couldn't ever ask for something more.
I am sure the author will subsequently improve the indexing since most people seem to take an offence in that but the contents are just right.Of course Metcalf/Reid (Fortran 90/95 Explained) is also a very good text but is largely for reference purposes. Metcalf/Reid DOES NOT and will not teach you the nitty-gritty of fortran programming. In Metcalf/Reid, you must already have been there in programming, but Chapman will gradually take you to whatever level you deisre, depending on what you need. Very importantly, Chapman sprinkles throughout the text, several scientific and engineering examples and I guess it is why the text was so named in the first place - Fortran 90/95 for Scientists and Engineers.
It doesn't matter if you figure that you are way too cerebral and that Chapman is too simplistic for you. If you ever want to venture into programming, chances are that you are not an imbecile and any additional little knowledge gained is always an eternal treasure. This is an excellent text for programming in Fortran 90/95 and you'll be grateful that you did own a copy. Period.
Summary: Horrible as a reference.
This is probably one of the worst programming books I have ever used. The index is terrible, which turns finding any random info into a page by page scavenger hunt. There are very few tables which give nice breakdown of parameters and what not, as the author prefered to scatter information about a single function call through two or three chapters. The "scientific and engineering" aspect of programming is so spoon fed it really does nothing to enhance understanding of the subject.
Further if you are new to programming this book will do more harm than good. In trying to explain the concept of a loop, showing how to count to 10 is a much better example than calculating sin( x) by series expansion. After all, if you have the math background to do such a thing, and even a small amount of programming know how ( gathered from GOOD reference books ) you can do this kind of stuff without the author pretty much telling you what algorythm to use. The extra effort to code the sin(x) example, therefore, just gets in the way and muddies up the original point of the example ( to demonstrate a loop in this case. )
I was introduced to this book in a college physics programming course and was amazed at how horrible this book was for teaching the subject. Students with little to no programming experience ( but plenty of physics experience )were lost and confused because the examples do a poor job of showing you what they are suposed to, and those with already good programming skills in other languages about died from paper cuts searching through the book by hand to find the syntax of the print function. A poor book all the way around. After some searching it appears that a good "Teach yourself Fortran 90 in 21 days," type book is hard to come by, but that ( imo ) is what fortran really needs to make it accessible to potential new users of the language, since meshing the actual 'language' and the 'for scientists and engineers' stuff just makes everything more complicated than it needs to be for a reference book. The only scientific/math/programming book I ever actually sold back to the college when the course was over.
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