Ada 95: Problem Solving and Program Design (3rd Edition)

Ada 95 is nicely written easy to understand book. I use this book in beginning Ada 95 course that I teach. It explains programming concepts and Ada 95 constructs in a interesting way by citing examples. It comes with a CD which has GNAT Ada95 compiler (for PC/MAC/UNIX) as well as key documentations like ARM, AARM, and Rationale in text, html and postscript format. I highly recommend this book to any one interested in learning Ada 95 from beginning. Great book!!!

The text is an organized, well written, generously exampled introduction to Ada95 for the novice. It provides a good basis for object oriented programming using Ada95 for generics and privates (ADTs), it does not cover as fully or clearly inheritance and/or polymorphism. This book is apropriate for a 200 level CS class. I personally was disappointed with the amount of clear differentiation between Ada83 and Ada95. The section on tasking dismisses conditional Select entry as being beyond the scope of the book. Variant records are given too large a play. though they are a good intro to the thinking behind Ada polymorphism, in practice (Ada83) they are too code intensive and have serious short comings when used as private data elements. Overall, I think that this is a good, complete Ada95 introductory text. It is NOT an in-depth push the boundaries of the language or a "here's how to go from Ada 83 to Ada 95."

I use this book in several Ada courses that I teach. This book is outstanding! The accompanying CD contains a validated compiler and all the examples in the textbook. The examples are excellent! Mark Oestmann

Intended as a text for an introductory computer science course, Ada 95 Problem Solving and Design is thorough reference to the basics of Ada-95 programming, expecially considering the short time between the ratification of the standard and the publishing of this book. The features of the new language are seamlessly integrated; this is not an Ada-83 text with appendices regarding Ada 95. This is helpful for the beginning audience for which it is intended, but Ada-83 programmers may not notice new constructs until too late. This book's major distinction is its abnormal organization; Chapter 4, for example, deals simultaneously with the IF statement and writing your own packages! This serves to quickly introduce newcomers to the more powerful and complex structure of the language, but it sometimes adds confusion. All in all, I would recommend this book as a good introductory text to the language. A small note about the differences in Ada-83 and Ada-95 would have been helpful, but it successfully reaches its target audience.