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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,595c75298fbdce96 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!g33g2000yqc.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Ada novice Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is Aunit helpful? Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 10:32:27 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <8a1e58c0-2330-4475-8013-97df103dd85e@o19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com> <8bb67638-e3c0-449c-bed7-a7f24e453ae0@j8g2000yqd.googlegroups.com> <6731bc61-4cd5-4154-8de6-0bdaeb81cc84@g33g2000yqc.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 193.11.22.91 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1281461547 14516 127.0.0.1 (10 Aug 2010 17:32:27 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:32:27 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: g33g2000yqc.googlegroups.com; posting-host=193.11.22.91; posting-account=Rr9I-QoAAACS-nOzpA-mGxtAlZ46Nb6I User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:13079 Date: 2010-08-10T10:32:27-07:00 List-Id: On Aug 9, 7:05=A0pm, John McCormick wrote: > I'm very happy you have found my Ada textbooks useful! =A0It is always > nice when someone notices a book author's name. =A0Feel free to contact > me directly if you have any questions on the material in the books. > The OO material in the data structures book is elementary. =A0Check out > the Barnes or Ben-Ari books for an in depth treatment. =A0Should you > want to go on to learn about Ada's concurrent features, I have a new > book coming out at the end of the year: Building Parallel, Embedded, > and Real-Time Applications with Ada,www.cambridge.org/9780521197168 > It is aimed at introducing the topics to novices with a background in > sequential programming. I do remember author names of books that have caught my attention :). I have been looking at around 15 books (published since 1980) in Ada and your two books are certainly very accessible to anyone wishing to learn Ada well. I'm a PhD student in mechanical engineering wishing to learn and use Ada for scientific numerical programming. So far, Ada with its strong typing has enabled me to make much less mistakes than I was doing earlier with C. And I have also learned a few aspects of software engineering. As my interest is in scientific numerical programming, only the first half or so of your Data Structures book is relevant to me as I see it today. I wish that authors in future Ada books to also focus a bit more on the numerics annex of Ada 05 and give some useful examples which can help someone to build his/her mathematical library. I know Ben-Ari books. They are also well-written though at this instant in time seem a bit advanced for me in some parts of the books. Barnes' books are perhaps more challenging. What's make them challenging in my opinion is the lack of complete examples but I understand that complete examples would make less space for more discussions. I'm not at this moment into concurrent features but I'm certain that your forthcoming book will be pleasurable to read and I would definitely read the book at some point in the future. Studying a book on concurrency will in my opinion help to break one's habit of always finding a solution using sequential logic that we tend to pick up from other programming languages around and thus will surely help to build better codes. I shall contact you directly if I have questions relating to your books. Thanks. YC