best tutorial websites or books for beginner in FORTRAN

[Kei]

Hello,

Could anyone recommend books, websites, or media that teaches the basics of Fortran as clearly as possible for a beginner? I have some experience with C++ from my first year in Computer Science studies in college but no previous experience with Fortran aside from reading and coding a little in this language since June. Books I have used as references so far are "Fortran 95/2003 for Scientists and Engineers" by Stephen J. Chapman and "Modern Fortran Explained" by Metcalf, Reid, and Cohen. I would appreciate any input on tutorials. Are there also any free online courses available on FORTRAN or other languages?

Thanks for your time.

[paul.rich...@gmail.com]

The GFortran wiki has a page "Fortran 95 tutorials available online". It's not been updated for a bit but you should find what you need there.

Cheers

Paul

[JWM]

This one should get you started on Fortran's basics (including derived
types and modules):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran_language_features

And this one contains a lot of resources:

http://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/HomePage

You'll find some object-oriented stuff in the tutorials section of the
latter.

--
John.

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Kei <raid...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Could anyone recommend books, websites, or media that teaches
> the basics of Fortran as clearly as possible for a beginner?
> I have some experience with C++ from my first year in Computer
> Science studies in college but no previous experience with
> Fortran aside from reading and coding a little in this
> language since June.

Experienced C++ programmers should learn Fortran pretty fast,
but a first-year CS course might not be enough.

> Books I have used as references so far are "Fortran 95/2003 for
> Scientists and Engineers" by Stephen J. Chapman and
> "Modern Fortran Explained" by Metcalf, Reid, and Cohen.
> I would appreciate any input on tutorials.

Those should be good choices, though maybe not tutorial.

At some point, you have to start writing lots of small programs,
and getting them to work.

You might try: http://practiceit.cs.washington.edu/practiceit/
though it teaches Java. Many of the ideas that you need to
learn are language independent. PracticeIt allows you to
write programs (sometimes only parts of programs) run them,
see the output, and test it against the expected output,
all without a person in the loop. Your programs are compiled
and run by the server!

It would be interesting to have something similar for Fortran,
but I don't know of one.

> Are there also
> any free online courses available on FORTRAN or other languages?

https://www.coursera.org/course/scicomp

Covers a reasonable amount of scientific Fortran programming,
including OpenMP and MPI. It looks like a session just ended,
but you might still be able to sign up for it, watch the lectures,
and do the problems. There is no certificate (or, at least,
not the last time I looked) but the point is to learn.
Sign up soon, or it might not let you in.

There are also:

https://www.coursera.org/course/scientificcomp

and

https://www.coursera.org/course/compmethods

which mostly use Matlab or Octave, but are good introductions
to scientific computing and the associated math.


-- glen

[FortranFan]

First, unless you're a history buff, IGNORE anything you see about FORTRAN 77 and older stuff.

Second, I suggest you start with Fortran 90 for Scientists and Engineers by Larry Nyhoff and Sanford Leestma, Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (September 20, 1996) ISBN-10: 0135197295, ISBN-13: 978-0135197295. My opinion is it is the best introductory book on the foundation of "modern" Fortran language that goes all the way up to the 201x revision that is now in the works, past the Fortran 2008 standard extension and the major jump with 2003 standard, and a minor one with Fortran 95.

You can then move on to the other material you're going to see on this forum topic; you can also consider going back to "Modern Fortran Explained" by Metcalf, Reid, and Cohen.