This book grew from our own need to write good computer programs.We

work in an interdisciplinary research center whose mission is to develop and

evaluate statistical methodologies and disseminate them to a broad scien-

tifi c community. Computing and softwar edevelopment play an increasingly

important role both in our research and in dissemination. When faced with

the task of actually writing a statistical program, however,we found our-

selves with out a road map.We needed an over all strategy.

After initial discussions, we drafted a brief document for our colleagues

That contained guidelines for programming in Fortran. We also wrote libraries of Fortran procedures that could be shared among applications and

A sample program to serve as a template for other projects.