Re: Book REview

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <dewar.831408874@schonberg>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>
>This is very confused on Richard's part. The Type Character is always
>Latin-1, in which 'A'..'Z' is definitely contiguous. The quoted code
>is correct Ada. Sure you could have a type EBCDIC which had other
>characteristics, but Standard.Character itself is definitely ISO Latin-1.
>I can't imagine exactly what gave Richard a contrary impression.

Thanks for this correction, Robert.
>
>I did not read the rest of Richard's "review" in detail, but I should
>say that I have been using this text in my CS2 course at NYU, and I
>have found if very effective (I don't like the upper case keywords, but
>that's hardly a significant criticism!) I particularly think that the
>discussion of generics and abstract data types is well done.

This is a nice plug, but for a different book. Richard is referring
to Feldman/Koffman, "Ada 95 Problem Solving and Program Design", the
CS1-level book that appeared in February. It is this book that will
be bundled with the forthcoming Intermetrics/Thomson "Academic
AdaMagic" compiler on CDROM. I believe the CD is due in August.

The book you're using in your class is my CS2 book, Feldman, "Software 
Construction and Data Structures in Ada 95", which is at the printer's 
and will be in stock at the beginning of next month (June).
>
>No doubt one can find minor typos, but they have not proved a problem
>for us using the book, and the examples on diskette (whcih are really
>the only form in which students look at the programs closely) are
>accurate.

The same is true of the CS1 programs. One minor correction: Addison
Wesley has gotten out of the diskette business and instead has set
up a web/ftp site for code distribution. I'm not so sure I like this
abandonment of the diskette, but it's a sign of the times.

One more plug, this time for my list of Ada 95 texts (mine and all
the others) at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/ada95books.html
and all the various www mirrors. There's a nice selection of books, 
with reviews written by a number of reviewers. Also there are pointers
to the web sites for the individual books, where these exist.

Enough hype for now.:-)

Cheers -

Mike Feldman