Fortran 95/2003 Explained (Numerical Mathematics and Scientific Computation)

Rating:
Summary: Concise, authoritative, clear, not for new programmers.
Review: Fortran 95 and especially Fortran 2003 are more modern and larger languages than the Fortran 77 many programmers have used. Some of the features in Fortran 95 not in Fortran 77 are free source form, array operations (similar to Matlab), user-defined types, and modules. Some new features in Fortran 2003 are support for object oriented programming with (single) inheritance, procedure (function) pointers, IEEE arithmetic, interoperability with C, and command line arguments.

The first ten chapters of the book cover the Fortran 95 subset of Fortran 2003, and the following chapters cover the new features of Fortran 2003.

The three co-authors are Fortran experts and have served on the
Fortran standards committee. Their writing is clear and concise,
packing a great deal of information into 416 pages. Earlier editions have been the most referenced books by serious Fortran programmers.

The book plays a role for Fortran a similar to Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" for C++. It is not a textbook for a novice programmer -- the reader should already know the basics of procedural programming. More pedagogical books on Fortran 90/95 for are those by Meissner, Chapman, and
Ellis/Phillips/Lahey. A good book for transitioning Fortran 77
programmers is one by Redwine.

Fortran 2003 compilers are not yet available as of January 2005. I suggest that the reader focus on the Fortran 95 chapters and write some programs to get a feel for the language. Then the motivations for the Fortran 2003 features described later in the book will be clearer.