Customer Reviews (1)

Provides continuity for FORTRAN IV legacy code users
Sometimes, very high quality source code is dumped onto the Internet just because it is old.For FORTRAN 77/90+ programmers that occasionally use or otherwise maintain legacy FORTRAN IV (a.k.a. FORTRAN 66) source code, this textbook provides valuable continuity back to the older standard.This title was published while the FORTRAN 77 standard was being finalized, so it still largely reflects the FORTRAN 66 standard - at the same time, it further discusses the up and coming FORTRAN 77 standard and the relationships between the two.

The preliminary chapter (Chapter 0) is most valuable as it provides a concise overview of FORTRAN 66 in about 40 pages.Later chapters instruct on some of the long forgotten FORTRAN 66 tricks that sometimes cause the eyebrows of modern programmers to furrow when trying to understand inherited code.I also found this book to be very helpful in understanding the use of characters variables in FORTRAN 66, which may be foreign to the FORTRAN 77/90+ programmer use to explicitly declared characters variables.I regret that the book did not acknowledge some of the antiquated non-standard features such as ENCODE and DECODE commonly seen in old source code.

Understandably, the actual presentation of FORTRAN 77 is less than complete, and the book is a self-proclaimed "advanced" book, so this is certainly not the best book from which to learn modern FORTRAN.And while there are other older books that can help one's understanding of FORTRAN 66, this hardback just also happens to be a fine tutorial on the subject on programming.Apparently, this title was quite popular and in print for many years. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Where I learned FORTRAN
This book was recommended to me back in my undergraduate college days from a fellow student who knew a lot about computers than I did.I found it to be a good introduction to the subject.For someone studying FORTRAN today, they might find it somewhat lacking in that it does not deal with the more recent capabilities of FORTRAN 77 and FORTRAN 95, such as how to more easily enable calculations involving matrices--as these more recent dialects more efficiently allow the programmer to perform. ... Read more