Re: Writing Book, Need Ada Ammunition

[mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn)]

In article <1999Jul22.141618.1@eisner>, kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
|> > How about the number of Ada books published by the competition... have
|> > a look at amazon.com.
|> 
|> How about the fact that none of those other books are specifically
|> aimed at the Linux user.  I would think having the only book with
|> a particular slant would count for something.

The probably most important aspect of this book should be that it
does not only treat the Ada language along as all the other Ada
books do, but that it introduces right from the beginning the use of
all the libraries (both existing Ada bindings and directly accessing
C library functions) that are extremely important to do something
useful under Unix.

Just look at the FAQs in this newsgroup:

  - how do I open a TCP connection in Ada?
  - how do I write a simple web server in Ada?
  - how to I clear the screen in Ada?
  - how to I get the cursor to position x/y in Ada?
  - how do I access the serial/parallel port in Ada?
  - how do I move sprites and generate sound effects in Ada?
  - how do I access the mouse and keyboard directly in Ada?

There exists at the moment not a single book that answers these
questions. Existing Linux/Unix books answer them only for C
programmers, and existing Ada books say that this is an operating
system dependent functionality, please consult the vendor documentation
(which does not exist yet for Ada on Linux at this level).

At the moment there is no book that explains how to use the Ada
bindings to ncurses, GTK+, AdaSockets, Mesa, etc.

Tip:

I still believe that introducing Ada in a platform dependent form
by explaining how to write video games is an excellent starting point
for an exciting book or course. Video games are real-time applications
that can be very elegantly formulated with Ada's tasking capabilities.
There exist various simple Linux gaming libraries for C, and you could
distribute with your book a thick Ada binding for one of them or even
better an Ada reimplementation of one of these, such that your
readers can learn as one of the larger application examples
how to write a game purely in Ada. Existing gaming libraries
are usually front-ends for /dev/sound and for Xlib's ability to
place color bitmaps stored in the server quickly only any position
in an X window.

Explaining how to write a very simple web server or client are
usually also highly motivating examples that a book purely based
on the RM without use of additional bindings cannot use.

The programming examples provided in existing Ada books are
dull and boring.

There exists no single book yet that talks about POSIX.5 and FLORIST.

I see a huge niche here, that requires AT LEAST 3-4 different books
to fill it adequately, and your proposed project could well
become one of them.

I would certainly buy it.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>