Ada95 From the Beginning by Jan Skansholm- Opinions

Ada95 From the Beginning by Jan Skansholm- Opinions

[middleman]

Having studied a years worth of Ada at University I would say that I have
grasped the basic concepts of Ada95. The course textbook was "Ada95 From the
Beginning" by Jan Skansholm. I would now like to get a little bit deeper
into Ada but I have been finding this book rather confusing.

My question is, what are people opinions on this book?
Should I stick with it or would I be better of looking for a different book?
Also I'd like to know if there are any Ada problem solving books so that I
could have a something to test what I have learned on (if you know what I
mean).

thanx.

--
ByeZeeBYe
middleman
chuck(les)

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/c.dand

Ada95 From the Beginning by Jan Skansholm- Opinions

[tmoran]

>Should I stick with it or would I be better of looking for a different book?
  If you're having trouble with the way a book explains something,
try a different book.  Perhaps a different explanation will make more
sense.  That's true in general.  People come with different backgrounds
and perspectives and the explanation one person finds crystal clear
is often mud to a different person.

Re: Ada95 From the Beginning by Jan Skansholm- Opinions

[DPH]

Personally, when trying to learn something strictly by reading as opposed to a
classroom experience, I generally get 3 books.  Invariably, I get to some point
in even the best books where I'm thinking, "Huh?  What's this mean?" and that's
when I consult one or maybe both of the other books.

Dave Head

tmoran@bix.com wrote:

> >Should I stick with it or would I be better of looking for a different book?
>   If you're having trouble with the way a book explains something,
> try a different book.  Perhaps a different explanation will make more
> sense.  That's true in general.  People come with different backgrounds
> and perspectives and the explanation one person finds crystal clear
> is often mud to a different person.

Re: Ada95 From the Beginning by Jan Skansholm- Opinions

[Aidan Skinner]

On Mon, 30 Aug 1999 00:05:48 +0100, middleman
<no-spam-thanx@ukonline.co.uk> wrote: 

>grasped the basic concepts of Ada95. The course textbook was "Ada95 From the
>Beginning" by Jan Skansholm. I would now like to get a little bit deeper
>into Ada but I have been finding this book rather confusing.

It depends what you mean by confusing. It isn't a great teaching book,
and definately not one that I'd reccomend for learning Ada '95
from. OTOH it's a fairly good book for learning to program from, for
the same reasons that it isn't good for learning Ada. Mostly because
it only goes so far, barely skimming a few parts of the language and
ignores others (OO, concurrency, representation clauses) completely. I
also thought that some of it was badly explained. I would have great
difficulty reccomending it to anyone who knows the basics of
programming already.

>Should I stick with it or would I be better of looking for a different book?

My personal favourite Ada text book is John English's "Ada '95: The Craft of
Object Oriented Programming", but Cohen, and Mike Feldman's books are
also good general text books. For pure reference stuff, I swear by my
html-ised copy of the reference manual.

If you're interested in concurrency, then "Concurrency in Ada" by
Burns and Wellings is the only choice I'm aware of that goes into
great detail, but fortunately it's a very good one. It does assume a
certain level of knowledge about the rest of the language.

- Aidan
-- 
Gimme money, gimme sex, gimme UNIX and root access.
http://www.skinner.demon.co.uk/aidan/

Re: Ada95 From the Beginning by Jan Skansholm- Opinions

[Ehud Lamm]

On 30 Aug 1999, Aidan Skinner wrote:

|If you're interested in concurrency, then "Concurrency in Ada" by
|Burns and Wellings is the only choice I'm aware of that goes into
|great detail, but fortunately it's a very good one. It does assume a
|certain level of knowledge about the rest of the language.
|

I browsed this book and it seems very good. Alas it was to expensive, so I
left it at the book shop.
I was impressed with the examples and discussions.

Ehud Lamm     mslamm@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ehudlamm  <== My home on the web