Designed for undergraduate social science students, this textbook concentrates on using the computer in a straightforward way to manipulate numbers and variables in order to solve problems. The text is problem oriented and assumes that the student has had little prior experience with either a computer or programing languages. An introduction to FORTRAN is presented early in the book. Chapter headings include: descriptive statistics; file processing; mathematics and computation; approximation; and simulation. In addition, BASIC is described in the appendix. (MC)