Re: Good Quality ADA Programmers Guides

[abbasi@smaug.enet.dec.com (Nasser ABBASI)]

In article <1991Apr6.031526.6538@engin.umich.edu>, mthoms@engin.umich.edu (Michael Kenneth Thoms) writes...
>  Does anyone know of any good ADA programmers guides
>  for beginners? I am taking a job with a firm that 
>  is intrested in doing Air Trafic Control work in ADA.
>  
>  Any advice as to what book to read to get a lot of
>  ADA programming experience quickly?
> 
>  Thanks in advance.
> 
>Mike Thoms 
>University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

 Ok, you need to keep in mind to get the 'Big' picture as well the
 'small' picture, to get the most out of the language.

 A good book for showing how to design using ada is 
 'software engineering with ada' Grady Booch.

 ANother good book with more detailed into ada is
 'ADA  as a second language' by  Norman H. Cohen (McGraw-hill) (830 pages)

 to get a look at ADA packages for different types of structures see
 'Software Components with ADA' Grady Booch.

 you'll find as you work more with ADA, that the way you think of programming 
 will be different from non object-based languages such as C,Pli,Pascal etc.
 you'll end up spending more time in design stage, you Boss might start
 getting worried because not-much-code is cracked out, but in the end
 you should end up with a better designed and built software, since the
 language seems to make you think more of what you are doing. (ie. in terms
 of packages, Data Hiding, forces you to update an OUT parmeter, declare
 parmeter IN, OUT, INOUT to make it cleare to maintain etc..)

 on the otehr hand there is no language that will prevent one from writting bad 
 code!

 If you were to learn ADA and say C from the scratch, you'll learn C
 faster and start writing programs quicker in C, but even though ADA 
 will take you longer to learn and to start writing large program in it,
 I think the pay off should be worth it. IMHO offcourse.

 /naser

**** discalimer: this are my own personal opinions, as always