Re: Which docs first?

[gerhard.nospam@bigfoot.de (Gerhard Häring)]

On Mon, 15 Oct 2001 21:17:15 GMT, Clueless <chris@dont.spam.me> wrote:
>Recentely I've been spending alot of time just reading through the LRM and
>the Rationale. I'm also planning on going through the GNAT source code(as
>per the recommendation found in Aho's Dragon Books).
>
>My question is this...how much time should a novice spend reviewing the
>official Ada docs( i.e.  the LRM and the Rationale), and compiler source
>code in proportion to the amount of time reading through the tutorials and
>text books that are available for newcomers to the language. Books such as
>Barnes's "Programming in Ada95" for instance, or the tutorials one finds 
>out on the Net?

At the start:

3  %: LRM
97 %: good book (like Barnes')
0  %: reading GNAT sources

When you're more experienced, you will need more official language
references, but at the beginning it's safe to ignore them.

Worked for me for all of the languages I learnt. I stopped counting them
;-)

I never needed to look into compiler sources. Only into interpreter
sources to look why some operations take more time than others.

>I am assuming that there is nice middle ground somewhere, where one can
>become familiar with the guts of the language without becoming
>overwhelmed by what may appear on the  surface to be an extremely
>complex set of syntax and general language rules.

When learning a language, I nowadays tend to read relatively much of a
book, so that I get a grasp of the bigger picture. Only then I start
coding test programs (i. e. I skip hello world and the likes). Formerly,
I wanted to code as soon as possible. But that's personal taste and also
depends on the type of language. I think this helps understanding the
"Why" and not only the "How" earlier.

All IMNSHO, of course.

Gerhard
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