Structured FORTRAN 77 for Engineers and Scientists

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.

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.

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.