Re: Ada95 From the Beginning by Jan Skansholm- Opinions

[aidan@skinner.demon.co.uk (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/