Writing Scientific Software: A Guide to Good Style

The core of scientific computing is designing, writing, testing, debugging and modifying numerical software for application to a vast range of areas: from graphics, meteorology and chemistry to engineering, biology and finance. Scientists, engineers and computer scientists need to write good code, for speed, clarity, flexibility and ease of re-use. Oliveira and Stewart's style guide for numerical software points out good practices to follow, and pitfalls to avoid. By following their advice, readers will learn how to write efficient software, and how to test it for bugs, accuracy and performance. Techniques are explained with a variety of programming languages, and illustrated with two extensive design examples, one in Fortran 90 and one in C++: other examples in C, C++, Fortran 90 and Java are scattered throughout the book. This manual of scientific computing style will be an essential addition to the bookshelf and lab of everyone who writes numerical software.

Suely Oliveira is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Iowa. David Stewart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Iowa.

'Writing Scientific Software bridges the chasm that too often separates numerical analysis from real scientific computing. It is full of tips, tricks, and just plain interesting information. The reader will learn how to write code that takes advantage of many hidden features in modern computer architectures, programming languages, and compilers. This is a book that is full of good sense.' William H. Press, author of Numerical Recipes 'The book is a useful tool working in the filed of scientific computations...' Zentralblatt MATH