Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 292 pages
- Published by: Wiley
- Edition: 1st Edition September 9, 1998
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0471955965
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0471955962
-
Book Dimensions:
9.6 x 6.6 x 0.9 inches
- Weighs: 1.2 pounds
Reader Reviews
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.
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