Ada books, especially on tasking

[MFELDMAN@GWUVM.BITNET (Mike Feldman)]

RE: Ada books concenrating on the rendezvous:

Narain Gehani, "Ada: Concurrent Programming", Prentice Hall 1984.
Alan Burns: "Concurrent Programming in Ada", Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985.

Both are informed and literate tutorials and assessments of the Ada
tasking model. The Burns one is more critical, based on a serious
dissertation done in the UK. Some of the things Gehani criticizes
about Ada tasking are "fixed" (albeit in the C world) in a very
interesting Bell Labs toy called Concurrent C, which glues Ada
tasking model onto C. It's a preprocessor/runtime library setup;
last time I checked it was available (only) to universities.
Contact Narain Gehani at AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill.

There is a new book by Ken Shumate (which may or may not be in print
yet) which does a fair amount of system design using tasking. I've seen
some of the examples; some have been published in AdaLetters recently.
Looks like a good book. I think the publisher is Harper & Row.

For another view of tasking, check out

George Cherry, "Parallel Programming in ANSI Standard Ada", Prentice-Hall.
I think the other books are more objective and analytical, though.