Re: Ada 101

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

In article <319E19DA.78A6@swcp.com>, Gordon Dodrill  <dodrill@swcp.com> wrote:
>Kenneth Mays wrote:
>> 
>> I need a book that ANYONE can read and understand with minimal
>> difficulty. Does such a  book exist for the Ada market?!
>
>There is a complete Ada 83 tutorial at the site listed below.  You may want
>to take a look at it.
>
I took a quick look at this. It's really a pretty nice piece of work,
at a level similar to John Herro's Ada-Tutr. It's a shareware work,
requesting a $15.00 shareware fee. In my opinion, it's worth the fee.
It seems to be well thought-out and well-edited.

I have a couple of friendly suggestions, based just on my very quick
look.

(1) Right at the start, the author describes Ada as a "very large
    language." By comparison, his C++ tutorial - at the same site -
    does not describe C++ in the same terms. Given that C++ and Ada
    are roughly the same "size" these days - C++ has no tasking but
    otherwise modern C++ and modern Ada have very similar features -
    it's misleading and intimidating to describe Ada this way.
    
(2) I think it would be a great idea to insert hyperlinks in the text
    to point to the programs. This wouldn't be hard to do, and would
    let a casual reader explore the tutorial - programs included -
    on the Web.

(3) In the "other resources" section, there are links to SIGAda and
    AdaIC, but none to Home of the Brave Ada Programmers,
    http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/ I hope Gordon will add this.

I hope Gordon will see fit to add the material necessary to teach
Ada 95; Ada 83 is no longer "current". Nice job!

There are now at least 4 web-based Ada tutorials! This is good news!

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) 
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman
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       Pork is all that money the government gives the other guys.
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Ada on the WWW: http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/ or http://info.acm.org/sigada/
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