Jeffrey B. Morton

Morton's audience for the material in this book consists mostly of first-year engineering students. The first half of the book is focused on learning to program in BASIC. The second half of the book is focused on doing projects.

Morton tried to use a generic version of BASIC in writing this book. It is, in fact, a version similar to DEC's BASIC-Plus running from a teletype terminal attached to a time-sharing minicomputer.

Because of the nature of his audience (engineering students), two chapters are devoted to computer math. Chapter 7 deals with matrices. Chapter 8 deals with numerical methods.

The projects also have a bent toward engineering: Simulation of a Self-Reproducing System, Computer Graphics, The Great Motorcycle Jump, the Supertanker Simulator, The Area Under a Curve, World Dynamics Simulation, Simulation of the Rhine Test for ESP, Computer Dating, The Porsche 917 Race Car, Queuing, Determination of Roots and Extrema, and Optimization by Linear Programming.… (meer)