Written in a conversational and sometimes whimsical style, this book serves as a college text, self-study guide, and reference for programming in Classical FORTRAN, a simple subset of FORTRAN chosen for its utility in numerical computing. A special feature of the text is its detailed coverage of number storage formats and IEEE floating-point arithmetic. Early chapters offer a working introduction to the language, and later chapters cover topics most engineers and scientists need for casual programming, such as memory management, coding style, UNIX issues, and vector and parallel processing. An entire chapter is devoted to archaic, unusual, and dangerous usages (including the parts of FORTRAN 77 left out of the subset). The book concludes with a collection of utility routines. Most of the code in the book appears in short fragments meant to illustrate concepts rather than to perform a whole calculation or to serve by itself as a model for production code. A solutions manual, available separately, provides worked answers to about half of the book's 577 exercises. The book will be of interest to graduate students whose research involves scientific computing, and undergraduates studying or using numerical methods. The author is programming consultant and adjunct faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)