FORTRAN 77 and Numerical Methods for Engineers

Fortran 77 were, and it could continue being it, a powerful programming language, easy to learn and using for any scientific and technical schools students. All real-world scientific and engineering applications, from 1957 until late 1970's, they were programmed in Fortran. When the first personal computers appeared, at the beginning of the 1980's, Fortran compilers also got ready for them, but nowadays we haven't good compilers for home computers at affordable prices. The 77 version of Fortran added to the language the important and practical concepts about structured programming, what allowed to design and modify program routines orderly and easily, very laborious task of making with the previous sequential languages, because of the GOTO sentence, that became useless in structured languages. I would even say that the later versions of Fortran, the 90/95/2003..., the only thing that they add is to approach them to languages like C or C++ that don't contribute anything to facilitate the life to technical programmers and, on the other hand, they need to lose a precious time solving lots of specific internal language needs, far away of their real-world-problems to solve. A Fortran programmer doesn't need to design complicate user interfaces for input and output data, on the contrary to administrative applications programmers, which really need these tools, and for that reason, they need other languages different from Fortran. This book explains the Fortran 77 language very well and it includes many illustrative examples full developed, that makes it useful and interesting to learn and use, even in a self taught way. It is a pity not to have any appropriate Fortran 77 compilers for personal computers nowadays to practice it...