Migrating to Fortran 90 (Nutshell Handbooks)

By James F. Kerrigan

Book Overview

Many Fortran programmers do not know where to start with Fortran 90. What is new about the language? How can it help them? How does a programmer with old habits learn new strategies?This book is a practical guide to Fortran 90 for the current Fortran programmer. It provides a complete overview of the new features that Fortran 90 has brought to the Fortran standard, with examples and suggestions for use. The book discusses older ways of solving problems--both in FORTRAN 77 and in common tricks or extensions-- and contrasts them with the new ways provided by Fortran 90.The book has a practical focus, with the goal of getting the current Fortran programmer up to speed quickly. Two dozen examples of full programs are interspersed within the text, which includes over 4,000 lines of working code.Chapters cover the following topics: Aggregate array operations and array sections. Derived types (structures). Subroutines and functions revisited. Overloaded operators and assignment statements. Modules. Allocatable arrays and pointers. Improvements in file handling. Numeric precision (KIND and numeric intrinsics). Bit manipulation. New intrinsic functions.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 156592049X
• ISBN13: 9781565920491
• Release Date: October 1993
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 389 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Really useful reference and guide for programmers.

This is a very interesting and useful book.Both as a reference and a tutorial. I have been reading a lot of Fortran 90 books, and I haven't found a singol one which isn't either incomplete, extremely confused,or irrelevant. Only exception being the thick ANSI reference. What you need to know, when using FORTRAN 90, is first of all, in my opinion, how to use modules and internal subprograms, notably the way variables are shared or kept private, while using them.Do you have to use long lists of parameters in a call to a subroutine or none at all? Here is where you may start getting confused, but here is also where f90 is so very different from f77. The book of Kerrigan makes a great job in being both a reference with a good index, and a guided tutorial. The only drawback lies in the use of complicated and long codes to explain the usage of some of the new features, e.g linked lists. You will probably need to skip all of them, if you've got work to be done by the end of the day...Were it not for this, the book would deserve a five star.Still, this is a book I'd recommend you to keep close when writing your f90 codes... Too bad it is currently out of print.