* More on Ada 95 Textbooks
@ 1996-11-23 0:00 Michael Feldman
0 siblings, 0 replies; only message in thread
From: Michael Feldman @ 1996-11-23 0:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
An especially welcome trend in textbook publishing is the increasing
use of the Internet to distribute information and supplementary
materials.
Here are a few URLs that might interest CLA readers.
* * * * *
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/spider
A sequence of sections from the Feldman/Koffman text, showing one
"continuing saga" of text sections and projects that runs through
the book from Chapter 3 to Chapter 16.
This series can be thought of as yet another reincrnation of turtle
graphics; the nice thing about it is that - in addition to helping
beginners visualize the behavior of control structures - its
implementation is simple, so that students nearing the end of just
one 3-credit course can understand it. It's also portable, using only
an ANSI-compatible screen driver.
There's also a bit of computer graphics fundamentals here, especially
coordinate transformation. When we discuss this in my course, students
often ask about whether we can do computer graphics in Ada. "Of course,"
I tell them, "Spider _is_ computer graphics. We could use a more
elaborate high-resolution color screen, but that's just details."
* * * * *
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/cs1-im
The nearly complete "instructor's manual" (IM) for this text. We are putting
this on the Web to avoid killing trees and to update it dynamically.
It contains a lot of philosophical and "helpful hints" material.
The IM really has a visible part and a private part.:-) The private part
is a set of problem and project solutions I'll be finishing over the winter
break. These will be stored in the publisher's password-protected
ftp area; educators using the book can get the password from AW.
I welcome suggestions from students, other educators, and the community
on the public IM.
I'm also preparing to put my course project assignments (not the solutions!)
in the website; I encourage others to do the same.
* * * * *
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/book-cd
Details of the book-CD package formerly known as "Academic Ada."
* * * * *
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/concurrency
The concurrent programming chapter from "Software Construction and
Data Structures with Ada 95."
* * * * *
ftp://ftp.gwu.edu/pub/ada/courses
The program distributions from my intro and data structures texts.
These are identical to the programs in the books.
* * * * *
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman/papers/sigcse96.html
This is the set of viewgraphs I used in a panel talk at the 1996
SIGCSE conference. This panel, organized by Owen Astrachan of Duke,
was entitled "The First Year Beyond Language", and was a (IMHO very
successful) attempt to get beyond the intro-course language wars,
and discuss what unites rather than divides us.
Each of 6 panelists uses a different first-course language, but was
forbidden to identify the language until all panelists had given their
talks. My presentation gave a view that was, of course, consistent
with using Ada 95 as an intro language, but we were all quite pleased
to find that, overall, quite a bit unites us. Especially gratifying
was the overall emphasis on projects rather than just code, software
engineering (in a manner of speaking) rather than just programs, and
inculcating an "object" mindset in the students.
* * * * *
Enjoy. Comments welcome (but not about the uppercase reserved words!).
Mike Feldman
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] only message in thread
only message in thread, other threads:[~1996-11-23 0:00 UTC | newest]
Thread overview: (only message) (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
1996-11-23 0:00 More on Ada 95 Textbooks Michael Feldman
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox