Computing for Scientists: Principles of Programming with Fortran 90 and C++

Rating:
Summary: Pithy Treatment of a Voluminous Subject
Review: In addition to being a chemist myself who uses programming technologies extensively, I also teach courses designed to introduce relevant software technologies to other chemists, such as programming and database skills.

One of the problems that I faced was lack of a good introductory text on programming that would be relevant to an applied scientist. Most introductory programming books appear to be written for someone who intends to be a computer scientist, or even worse, rather than teaching language-independent skills, they try instead to teach you one programming language. As anyone knows who has ever browsed the computer section of their local bookstore or even here on Amazon, the number of books available on the topic of programming is enormous, to say the least.

I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this book at a local electronics store. For the time being, I am going to refer to it as a good starting point for any scientist who wishes to enhance his/her programming skills.

Barlow and Barnett cover many of the topics that I consider essential when learning any programming language, such as data types, operators, conditional statements, looping constructs, etc. Furthermore, he even covers important concepts like accessing memory (e.g. pointers in C++), state machines, abstraction, and object-oriented techniques. I was very happy to see the authors stress the importance of striving for ANSI compliant code.

For a book that was published in 1998, I was very impressed to see a section on template programming with C++. Clearly, Barlow and Barnett are very good at recognizing emerging trends. Furthermore, they are equally adept at explaining difficult concepts in a lucid way. Towards the end of the book, the authors' physics slant is evident by the section on numerical analysis, but the treatment is great, since it exemplifies how programming can be used for solving computationally intensive tasks that have physical significance.

Although this book on programming is geared towards scientists, it really would serve as a nice introduction to programming for any discipline. Although Fortran's popularity is very low outside of engineering, the juxtaposition of C++ with Fortran was a very nice touch, as it really allows one to look past language specific features in order to see generic programming concepts. Computer languages, like spoken languages, are such that, the first one is hardest to learn, but with each one you learn, the process of learning the next one becomes successively easier, and authors' use of two languages in one book really exemplifies this concept.

This book does not aim to teach you either C++ or Fortran, although it does point out some real pitfalls (e.g. in C++, x = a[i] + i++) in each language. Instead, the authors gives you a great foundation, from which you will be able learn generic programming concepts, as well as evaluate programming languages, so that in the future, you should be able to select one that is appropriate for your task at hand. Finally, they authors give great examples of using programming technologies to solve problems of a scientific nature, and he is able to accomplish in less than 300 pages what most books fail to do in three to four times that amount.

Rating:
Summary: unorthodox but very nice introduction to programming
Review: Intended for first or second year engineering or science students. It teaches programming at an introductory level. Yes, its a text book for one of those Programming 101 courses.

However, what sets this textbook apart from others is that it employs two languages (i.e. Fortran and C++), instead of one, to teach the same old material. And this has some interesting charasteristics. The authors has presented the material in a comparative way so that the student has the chance to see, very clearly, the relative merits of each language. For example, when they introduce arrays you will see the ease of Fortran in dealing with them. On the other hand, when object oriented programming is presented, C++'s superiority becomes apparent for that purpose. By seeing two languages side by side, one can also discern the fundamentals from language specific rules.

I'm familiar with Fortran and it has been a while since I took my first course in programming but this textbook has taught me quite a lot of things. If you know one of the languages, it might still make sense to buy it. You will appreciate your language better and will find what the other language does better. By the way, the book doesn't teach about mixed language programming.

Rating:
Summary: unorthodox but very nice introduction to programming
Review: Intended for first or second year engineering or science students. It teaches programming at an introductory level. Yes, its a text book for one of those Programming 101 courses.

However, what sets this textbook apart from others is that it employs two languages (i.e. Fortran and C++), instead of one, to teach the same old material. And this has some interesting charasteristics. The authors has presented the material in a comparative way so that the student has the chance to see, very clearly, the relative merits of each language. For example, when they introduce arrays you will see the ease of Fortran in dealing with them. On the other hand, when object oriented programming is presented, C++'s superiority becomes apparent for that purpose. By seeing two languages side by side, one can also discern the fundamentals from language specific rules.

I'm familiar with Fortran and it has been a while since I took my first course in programming but this textbook has taught me quite a lot of things. If you know one of the languages, it might still make sense to buy it. You will appreciate your language better and will find what the other language does better. By the way, the book doesn't teach about mixed language programming.

Rating:
Summary: Straight to what matters
Review: What set this book apart from other books is that it puts side by side C++ and Fortran. Not only that, it does not waste (your) time and talks about the essentials of these two programming languages in a straightforward away. Things like how to input and output your data, arrays, logical expressions and even "arcane" sujects like pointers and objects are presented in a clear way.

Note, though, that this is an introductory book that is aimed at those that are taking their first steps in C++ and/or Fortran programming. And for an introductory book it does a fine job.