Terms and Conditions:

John English wrote:Permission is given to redistribute this work for non-profit educational use only, provided that all the constituent files are distributed unchanged and without charge.

Book Excerpts:

This book is a beginner's introduction to Ada 95. It uses an example-driven approach that gradually develops small programs into large case-study type programs. The focus of this book is on using object-oriented approaches to write maintainable, extensive programs. Important and unique ADA features such as exception handling, user-defined types, procedures, functions, and packages are covered early in the text.

Many programming textbooks concentrates on teaching the features of a particular language, and use numerous small "blank canvas" examples to illustrate those features. What seems to be ignored all too often are the real-life situations where the problems deal with an existing legacy of programs or data which must be maintained and modified in some way. What this book tries to do is to concentrate on a relatively small number of examples which are capable of improvement and to refine them throughout the book. The result is that the order of topics is primarily example driven; new topics are introduced by adding extra "bells and whistles" to existing examples.

The examples start with the traditional "Hello world" program and gradually get more and more elaborate, culminating in two reasonably sized examples: an electronic diary and a spreadsheet. Although these are only about a thousand lines of code each in their final versions, they nevertheless show the sort of maintenance problems that arise in "real world" applications and illustrate how careful design can alleviate such problems.

Intended Audience:

This book aims squarely at the beginning programmer learning Ada 95 as a first language. Experienced programmers might find the going a bit slow in the first couple of chapters, but Ada is sufficiently different from most other languages that it’s worth reading these chapters anyway just in case they miss something important.

Review(s):

Amazon.com

:) "The author's explanations are thorough without being overly wordy, and the writing style is informal and friendly without being sloppy or imprecise. Programming exercises at the end of each chapter reinforce the chapters' content. These exercises make good homework assignments (from an instructor's point of view) and are good practice problems (from a reader's point of view)."