Yay. My program works. So far.

I am not a computer scientist. Nor am I programmer, nor aught else in that vein. Nevertheless, because of the field I've chosen, my job entails a great deal of programming.

The only formal training I've had was the C++ class I took as an undergrad. Pretty much the only CS class you could take at Virginia Tech without being a CS major. I long ago learned that C++ is not terribly useful for scientific computing (at least not the kind I'm doing). I've also learned that the way the class was "taught", it didn't teach me to program, it taught me to follow instructions. In grad school, the models I inherited were written in C. So I had to unlearn all the object-oriented stuff I knew, and basically picked up C from the code with which I was working. Given this dubious background, I'm sure I've picked up a large number of bad habits.

I'd like to teach myself to code properly. I've heard that Fortran is more efficient for scientific computing, but I'm likely to stick with C since I'm going to continue working with the C based convection models in the future. Is there a book any of you would recommend for this purpose?

I am so slow

Been meaning to post this for a while but I keep forgetting. Just saw Mystery Men again recently, and had a revelation. While it is a most entertaining film, I was a bit surprised to discover that Geoffrey Rush, who plays Cassanova Frankenstein, also plays Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean. Perhaps I'm just really slow, and this was immediately obvious to everyone else.