From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.1 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, TO_NO_BRKTS_PCNT autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,e2e5d82f29423074,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Barbara W. Barnes" Subject: Re: best ADA 95 bible ? (fwd) Date: 2000/02/22 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 588310643 Organization: University of Reading Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-02-22T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: My wife kindly sent me copies of some recent messages regarding books on comp.lang.ada. Some of the information was a little out of date and so I felt it might be helpful to add a few notes. >---------- Forwarded message ---------- >Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 02:52:30 -0000 >From: Nick Roberts >Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada >Subject: Re: best ADA 95 bible ? > >"Programming in Ada 95" by John Barnes [Addison-Wesley 1996, ISBN >0201877007] is often considered to be the canonical book on Ada 95. Please note that Programming in Ada 95 is now in its second edition (as from June 98) and the new ISBN number is 0-201-34293-6. > >I think its greatest strengths are that it covers nearly all aspects of the >language, that it is always precise, and that it covers the important >subjects in some depth. However, this book discusses the language largely >from the point of view of a computer scientist or experienced programmer; it >might be rather overwhelming for someone learning to program. A significant change from the first edition is the addition of some real working programs and a CD containing them and the Aonix compiler. There are quite a few other improvements as well. Even so by creative type-setting, I manged to keep the page count unchanged by setting the answers in double columns. I hope the examples will help a lot especially for the beginner. But rats! Perfection is not easily acheived and the book is not always 100% precise despite Nick's kind words Just as the third printing of this edition came out, a friend from British Aerospace pointed out an error in one example. The rational number package raises Constraint_Error on attempting to divide by a negative number. How awful! And it was tested by many famous Ada folk who will remain anonymous. Indeed this error can be traced right back to the first edition of the predecessor book which I wrote in 1981. This has at last convinced me of the value of testing. It is clearly not enough just to write a program and assume that it will be correct. The really old reader might recall that programmers were surprised to find in the 1950s that they made mistakes. Why should one write incorrect programs they thought. My apologies. Incidentally, a French translation just came out ISBN 2-7117-8651-X. The above error is corrected in that translation. Mais, peut-etre, autres erroirs, may avez been introduced - tiens! John Barnes