Book excerpt: This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the most important features of Fortran 2008. Features: presents a complete discussion of all the basic features needed to write complete Fortran programs; makes extensive use of examples and case studies to illustrate the practical use of features of Fortran 08, and supplies simple problems for the reader; provides a detailed exploration of control constructs, modules, procedures, arrays, character strings, data structures and derived types, pointer variables, and object-oriented programming; includes coverage of such major new features in Fortran 08 as coarrays, submodules, parameterized derived types, and derived-type input and output; highlights the topic of modules as the framework for organizing data and procedures for a Fortran program; investigates the excellent input/output facilities available in Fortran; contains appendices listing the many intrinsic procedures and providing a brief informal syntax specification for the language.