Rendezvous with ADA 95

Rendezvous with Ada is an excellent introduction to the wide scope and applicability of the Ada 95 language. The book is well written, containing chapters that are fairly self-contained and touch upon all key Ada concepts. One suggestion for a future edition would be inclusion of a chapter on Ada's current use in real-world projects, as well as a status report on Ada bindings to various industry-standard APIs.

I've owned Rendezvous with Ada 95 for about three years and it is still my favorite Ada 95 book. I have purchased other Ada 95 books that I like but none of them is as clearly written as this book by Naidich. It is the first book I loan to friends who want to learn about Ada programming and it is the first book I refer to when I want to explore another capability of this wonderful programming language.

I bought the first edition of Rendezvous With Ada many years ago, and with it as my only guide was able to learn this fairly complex language within a few weeks. The flow of the text is excellent, moving from simple to more challenging topics at a good pace. Even better, every aspect of the language, down to the most minute detail, is not only explained, but is demonstrated in one of the many example code segments that lace the book. As an added bonus, the example code is often as humorous as it is lucid. Together with the general enthusiasm conveyed by the prose, the examples not only made learning Ada easier, but genuinely fun. In the second edition of the book Naiditch has included coverage of the newer Ada95 version of the language, not merely by adding a few paragraphs at the end of each chapter, but by a thorough rewriting of the entire book - a rewriting that considerably expanded the book's content, but in no way lost the delightful enthusiasm of the first edition. I've read several other Ada texts since; although all have their merits, none come close to matching this one.