An Annotated Sampling of Ada-Oriented Textbooks

From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada - Where to get programs and books (long)
Date: 22 Sep 1994 12:23:43 -0400
Organization: George Washington University

September 1994

Michael B. Feldman
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
(202) 994-5919 (voice)
(202) 994-0227 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu

(with contributions from Jack Beidler, Duane Jarc, Suzanne Pawlan Levy, and Mathew Lodge, as indicated by their initials following their reviews)

As chair of the SIGAda Education Working Group, and a denizen of the Internet newsgroups, I am often asked to give references for "Ada textbooks." This list responds to these many queries.

• Group 1: Books Suitable for a First Course in Programming
• Group 2: Other Books Intended for Undergraduate Courses
• Group 3: A Selection of Other Ada-Related Books

I invite you to add to the list. Please write your annotated entry in the form I have used here and write or e-mail it to me. I will include it in my next version and credit you as a co-compiler of the list.

Disclaimers: I wrote two of the texts listed here; I hope the annotations are impartial enough. And any annotated bibliography is selective and opinionated. Your mileage may vary.

Group 1: Books Suitable for a First Course in Programming

Bover, D.C.C., K.J. Maciunas, and M.J. Oudshoorn. Ada: A First Course in Programming and Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley, 1992.

This work is, to our knowledge, the first Ada book to emerge from Australia, from a group of authors with much collective experience in teaching Ada to first-year students. A number of interesting examples are presented, for example, an Othello game. The book is full of gentle humor, a definite advantage in a world of dry and serious texts. In the book's favor is the large number of complete programs. On the other hand, it is rather "European" in its terseness; American teachers may miss the pedagogical apparatus and "hand-holding" typically found in today's CS1 books. Generic units are hardly mentioned.

Culwin, F. Ada: a Developmental Approach. Prentice-Hall, 1992.

This work introduces Ada along with a good first-year approach to software development methodology. Much attention is paid to program design, documentation, and testing. Enough material is present in data structures and algorithm analysis is present to carry a CS2 course. A drawback of the book is that the first third is quite "Pascal-like" in its presentation order: procedures, including nested ones, are presented rather early, and packages are deferred until nearly the middle of the book. This is certainly not a fatal flaw, but it will frustrate teachers wishing a more package-oriented presentation. The programs and solutions are apparently available from the author.

Dale, N., D. Weems, and J. McCormick. Programming and Problem Solving with Ada. D. C. Heath, 1994.

This book is inspired by Dale and Weems' very successful Introduction to Pascal and Structured Design, but it is not simply an Ada version. Ada's more advanced capabilities such as exceptions, packages and generic units are included in this text. In addition, more than half of the material is completely new, and the order of the topics is signficantly different. It also has more of a software engineering focus than the Pascal version. The only Ada topics not included in this text are tasks and access types. Procedures and packages are introduced early. Each chapter includes case studies, testing and debugging hints and excellent non-programming exercises and programming problems. The text comes with a program disk containing all the programs given in the book. In addition, a validated Meridian Ada compiler with complete documentation is available at low cost to students using this book. (S. P. L.)

DeLillo, N. J. A First Course in Computer Science with Ada. Irwin, 1993.

This book is a first in the Ada literature: a version comes with an Ada compiler, the AETech-IntegrAda version of Janus Ada. Author, publisher, and software supplier are to be commended for their courage in this. The book itself covers all the usual CS1 topics. In my opinion, the order of presentation is a bit too Pascal-like, with functions and procedures introduced in Chapter 5 (of 15) and no sign of packages (other than Text_IO) until Chapter 10. Unconstrained arrays and generics are, however, done nicely for this level, and Chapter 13 is entirely devoted to a single nontrivial case study, a statistical package. I wish there were more complete programs in the early chapters, to put the (otherwise good) discussion of control and data structures in better context.

Feldman, M.B., and E.B. Koffman. Ada: Problem Solving and Program Design. Addison-Wesley, 1991.

This work combines the successful material from Koffman's CS1 pedagogy with a software-engineering-oriented Ada presentation order. Packages are introduced early and emphasized heavily; chapters on abstract data types, unconstrained arrays, generics, recursion, and dynamic data structures appear later. The last five chapters, combined with some language-independent algorithm theory, can serve as the basis of a CS2 course. A diskette with all the fully-worked packages and examples (about 180) is included; the instructor's manual contains a diskette with project solutions.

Savitch, W.J. and C.G. Petersen. Ada: an Introduction to the Art and Science of Programming. Benjamin/Cummings, 1992.

This is a straightforward adaptation of the well-known Savitch Pascal books. Ada is introduced in a Pascal-like order, with subtypes and packages introduced halfway through the book. This is purely a CS1 book. The final chapter covers dynamic data structures. There is minimal coverage of unconstrained array types; generics are introduced at the halfway point to explain Text_IO, then continued only in the final chapter. The authors intended this book to provide a painless transition to Ada for teachers of Pascal; one wishes they had taken advantage of the chance to show some of the interesting Ada concepts as well. Program examples from the text are available on disk, but only as part of the instructor's manual; a solutions disk is available for a fee from the authors.

Skansholm, J. Ada from the Beginning. (2nd ed.) Addison Wesley, 1994.

This book was one of the first to use Ada with CS1-style pedagogy. There are excellent sections on the idiosyncracies of interactive I/O (a problem in all languages), and a sufficient number of fully-worked examples to satisfy students. Generics, linked lists and recursion are covered at the end; there is no tasking coverage, but one would not expect this at CS1-level. A very interesting addition is the new Chapter 14, in which OOP in both Ada 83 and Ada 94 is discussed. This is an especially lucid explanation of OOP in Ada, and makes a real contribution because it doesn't just discuss tagged types as a "feature" of Ada 94, but shows very nicely what is possible in Ada 83 (instead of just what is _not_ possible), and shows how Ada 94 adds functionality.

Smith, James F., and Thomas S. Frank Introduction to Programming Concepts and Methods with Ada McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1994

This is a well written and easy to use text. The book takes a spiraled approach to CS 1. The authors do an excellent job integrating Ada into the book. They take a very direct approach, especially with an early introduction to the package concept and the traditional Text_IO package. Faculty who have taught CS 1 with Pascal should like this book. Instead of making a big fanfare about Ada features, they simply introduce them as good support for software development concepts. The authors have carefully chosen the Ada topics they decided to cover in this book in order to strike a balance between staying true to the CS 1 course while presenting enough of the programming language. If you teach CS 1 you might at least want to get a copy of this text just to look at two chapters, Chapter 7 and Chapter 14. Seven covers program correctness and run-time event (exception handling) and fourteen is a beautiful presentation and example of generic packaging. Both presentations are done in an appropriate manner for CS 1. (J. B.)

Volper, D., and M. Katz. Introduction to Programming Using Ada. Prentice-Hall, 1990.

This book uses a heavily "spiraled" approach to Ada, and is designed for a 2-semester course, covering nearly all of Ada eventually. There are lots of fully-coded examples, and good pedagogical sections on testing, coding style, etc. If you like spiraling, you'll like this. The down side is that you can't find all you need on a given subject in one place. It's at the other end of the scale from the "Ada books" that follow the Ada Language Reference Manual (LRM) order.

Group 2: Other Books Intended for Undergraduate Courses

Ben-Ari, M. Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming. Prentice-Hall 1990. (OS/concurrency)

In my opinion, this is the best introduction to concurrency on the market. Ada notation is used for everything, but the focus is on concurrency and not on Ada constructs per se. I liked the CoPascal notation of the first edition better, but this book is still great. A software disk is promised in the preface; I had to work quite hard to get it from the publisher, which finally had to express-ship it from England. The software comes with a tiny Ada-ish interpreter, complete with Pascal source code, adapted from Wirth's Pascal/S via CoPascal. There are also some real Ada programs, most of which I've tested and found correct and portable.

Feldman, M.B. Data Structures with Ada. Addison Wesley, 1993. (CS2/data structures)

This book is a reasonable approximation to a modern CS2 book: "big O" analysis, linked lists, queues and stacks, graphs, trees, hash methods, and sorting, are all covered. The Ada is a bit old-fashioned, especially the lack of generics; the book was published before compilers could handle generics. The packages and other programs are available free from the author. The book is currently under revision with Addison-Wesley and should appear in 1995.

Fischer, C., and R. LeBlanc. Crafting a Compiler. Benjamin Cummings, 1988. (compilers)

This book uses Ada as its language of discourse and Ada/CS, a usefully large Ada subset, as the language being compiled. If you can get the "plain Pascal" tool software by ftp from the authors, you'll have a good translator-writing toolset. Skip the Turbo Pascal diskette version, which is missing too many pieces to be useful. I've used the book since it came out with both undergrad and graduate compiler courses; it embodies a good blend of theory and "how it's really done" coding. Students like it. The authors have recently published a second version, which uses C as its coding language but retains Ada/CS as the language being compiled.

Hillam, Bruce. Introduction to Abstract Data Types Using Ada. Prentice-Hall, 1994. (data structures)

This is a very readable treatment of data structures presented using Ada that makes good use of Ada features such as generics. It contain many complete programs and packages. Unfortunately, obvious syntax errors make it apparent that not all examples have been compiled. The level of presentation is somewhere between an elementary, CS 2, data structures course and an advanced, CS 7, course. A subset of first eleven chapters provide the appropriate topics for a CS 2 course, but not the pedagogy necessary for a course at that level. (D. J.)

Lomuto, N. Problem-Solving Methods with Examples in Ada. Prentice-Hall, 1987.(algorithms)

Inspired by Polya's classic How to Solve It, this book can make a nice addition to an Ada-oriented algorithms course. It makes too many assumptions about students' programming background to use as a CS1 book, and doesn't teach enough Ada to be an "Ada book." But it makes nice reading for students sophisticated enough to handle it. I'd classify it as similar to Bentley's Programming Pearls.

Miller, N.E. and C.G. Petersen. File Structures with Ada. Benjamin/Cummings, 1990. (file structures)

Designed for a straightforward ACM-curriculum file structures course, this book succeeds at what it does. There are good discussions of ISAM and B-tree organizations. The software can be purchased a low cost from the authors; it seems to approximate in Ada all those C-based file packages advertised in programmer-oriented trade publications.

Schneider, G.M., and S.C. Bruell. Concepts in Data Structures and Software Development (with Ada Supplement by P. Texel). West, 1991. (CS2/data structures)

This work is not, strictly speaking, an Ada book; rather, it is a solid, language-independent approach to modern CS2. The language of discourse in the book is a Pascal-like ADT language rather like Modula-2 in style; some examples are coded in legal Pascal. The Ada supplement makes it usable in an Ada-based course, but the supplement is rather too terse (100 pages of large type) for my taste, and insufficiently well keyed to the book chapters. The supplement's effectiveness would be greatly enhanced by full translations to Ada of a large number of the book's examples.

Sebesta, R.W. Concepts of Programming Languages (2nd ed.). Benjamin Cummings, 1993. (comparative languages)

If you've been around for a while, you might remember the late Mark Elson's 1975 book by the same title. This is similar: a concept-by- concept presentation, with -- in each chapter -- examples taken from several languages. I include this work in an "Ada list" because I like its nice, impartial coverage of Ada. I especially like the chapters on abstraction and exception handling. The book covers -- comparatively, of course -- most of the lanuages you'd like to see, including C, C++, Lisp, Smalltalk, etc., with nice historical chapters as well. The book is readable; my students like it. Our undergraduate and graduate courses both use it as a base text.

Weiss, M.A. Data Structures and Algorithms in Ada. Benjamin/Cummings, 1993.

I think this book reaches its intended market -- data structures courses (CS7) -- rather well with Ada. There's a good mixture of theory and practice (ADT design, for example), and coverage of new topics like amortized algorithm analysis and splay trees. A book at this level should not pay too much attention to teaching a language; rather it should make good use of its language of discourse. The Ada version does not attempt to teach either the language or Ada-style software engineering, but shows good understanding of the language, uses generic packages quite well and focuses on the theory of algorithms, as a book at this level should. This is the first, and so far the only, text in Ada for this course.

Group 3: A Selection of Other Ada-Related Books

Barnes, J. Programming in Ada. (4th edition) Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Barnes' work has been one of the most popular "Ada books." Some students find it hard to see how the pieces fit together from Barnes' often fragmentary examples; it is difficult to find complete, fully-worked out, compilable programs. This just-out fourth edition has a 100-page summary of Ada 9X.

Booch, G. Object-Oriented Design, with Applications. Benjamin Cummings, 1991.

This is a good comparative introduction to the "object-oriented (OO)" concept. The first half gives a balanced presentation of the issues in OO Design; the second half gives nontrivial examples from Ada, Smalltalk, C++, CLOS, and Object Pascal. The author tries to sort out the difference between object-based (weak inheritance, like Ada) and object-oriented (like C++) languages. My only real complaint is that Booch should have worked out at least some of his case studies using several different languages, to highlight the similarities and differences in the language structures. As it is, each case study is done in only a single language. The good news is that the book is remarkably free of the hyperbolic claims one sometimes finds in the OO literature. I think this book could be used successfully in a second- level comparative languages course.

Booch, G. Software Components with Ada. Benjamin Cummings, 1987.

This work is an encyclopedic presentation of data structure packages from Booch's OOD point of view. It is great for those who love taxonomies. It's not for the faint-hearted, because the volume of material can be overwhelming. It could serve as a text for an advanced data structures course, but it's thin in "big O" analysis and other algorithm-theory matters. The book is keyed to the (purchasable) Booch Components.

Booch, G. and D. Bryan Software Engineering with Ada. (3rd edition) Benjamin/Cummings 1994.

Another of the classical "Ada books." Introduces Booch's OOD ideas. Not for use to introduce Ada to novices, in my opinion; there are some nice fully-worked case studies but they begin too far into the book, after long sections on design, philosophy, and language elements. The earlier chapters contain too much fragmentary code, a common flaw in books that follow the LRM order. The third edition contains an appendix describing Ada 9X.

Bryan, D.L., and G.O. Mendal. Exploring Ada, Volumes 1.and 2. Prentice-Hall, 1990 and 1992 respectively.

This is an excellent study of some of the interesting nooks and crannies of Ada; it sometimes gets tricky and "language-lawyerly." Volume 2 takes up tasking, generics, exceptions, derived types, scope and visibility; Volume 1 covers everything else. The programs are short and narrowly focused on specific language issues. If you like Bryan's "Dear Ada" column in Ada Letters, you'll like this book. It is certainly not a book for beginners, but great fun for those who know Ada already and wish to explore.

Burns, A. Concurrent Programming in Ada. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

I used this book for years in my concurrency course. It's roughly equivalent to Gehani's book, but its age is showing. Cambridge Press is not always easy to get books from, especially in the US.

Burns, Alan and Wellings, Andy Real Time Systems and their Programming Languages Addison-Wesley 1990. (ISBN 0-201-17529-0)

This is an excellent and unique book. Basic concepts and terminology are explained before moving on to explain the major aspects of real time design. "Real world" examples are presented in Ada, Modula-2 and occam 2, though Ada is clearly the authors' language of choice and gets the most coverage. Topics covered include reliability and fault tolerance, concurrency, synchronisation, scheduling, message passing, atomic transactions, resource control, distributed systems and low-level device control. Efficiency is not neglected, and Ada support here is particularly strong with detail on the CIFO package. Several case studies are also presented. The only failing of the book is that it needs updating to cover Ada 9x and its real-time annex, Modula-3 etc. However, the basic concepts that the authors convey so clearly are independent of implementation language. (M. L.)

Cohen, N. Ada as a Second Language. McGraw Hill, 1986.

This book is a quite comprehensive exploration of Ada which follows the LRM in its presentation order. My graduate students like it because it is more detailed and complete than alternative texts. It's an excellent book for students who know their languages and want to study all of Ada. There are good discussions of "why's and wherefore's" and many long, fully-worked examples.

Gauthier, M. Ada: Un Apprentissage (in French). Dunod, 1989.

I found this an especially interesting, almost philosophical approach to Ada. The first section presents Ada in the context of more general laguage principles: types, genericity, reusability. The second section introduces testing and documentation concerns, as well as tasking; the third considers generics and variant records in the more general context of polymorphism. For mature Ada students in the French-speaking world, and others who can follow technical French, this book can serve as a different slant on the conventional presentations of the language. An English translation would be a real contribution to the Ada literature.

Gehani, N. Ada: an Advanced Introduction (2nd edition). Prentice-Hall, 1989.

I've always liked Gehani's literate writing style; he knows his languages and treats Ada in an interesting, mature, and balanced fashion. This book comes with a diskette sealed in the back of the book, which is advantageous because the book has numerous nontrivial, fully- worked examples.

Gehani, N. Ada: Concurrent Programming (2nd edition). Silicon Press, 1991.

This is a less formal, more Ada-oriented presentation of concurrency than the Ben-Ari work. I use both books in my concurrency course; its real strength is the large number of nontrivial, fully worked examples. Gehani offers a nice critique of the tasking model from the point of view of an OS person. The preface promises the availability of a software disk from the publisher.

Naiditch, D.J. Rendezvous with Ada New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1989.

A nice, relatively quick survey of the language for experienced programmers. Warning: there are not too many complete programs here, at least at the beginning. But overall, this is a good choice, less overwhelming than, say, Cohen, for "learning the language" quickly.

Nyberg, K. (editor) The Annotated Ada Reference Manual.(2nd edition) Grebyn Corporation, 1991.

This is the definitive work on Ada legalities, because it presents not only the full text of the LRM but also the official Ada Interpretations as prepared by the Ada Rapporteur Group of Working Group 9 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and approved by that organization. These commentaries, interleaved with the LRM text, are promulgated by the Ada Joint Program Office, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) agent for Ada, in the Ada Compiler Validation Suite (ACVC). They are thus binding upon compiler developers. I recommend this book as an essential volume in the library of every serious Ada enthusiast.

Shumate, K. Understanding Ada. (2nd edition) John Wiley, 1989.

This would make a CS1 book if it included more overall pedagogy, independent of language constructs. Otherwise it is a nice introduction to Ada in fairly gentle steps. Lots of completely worked examples, right from the start. Doesn't follow the LRM order, which is great.

Watt, D.A., B.A. Wichmann, and W. Findlay. Ada Language and Methodology. Prentice-Hall, 1987.

This work presents some interesting programming projects, and the coverage of design and testing--at the level of a first-year student--is quite good. The first third of the book concentrates heavily on classical control and data structures, leaving exceptions, packages and even procedures until the "programming in the large" material in the second third. CS2 teachers will find too little concentration on algorithm analysis. On the other hand, tasking and machine-dependent programming are covered. Like the Shumate work, this book would make a suitable introduction to Ada for students with a semester or so of programming experience; it "jumps in" too quickly to satisfy the needs of neophytes and is not well-tailored to CS1 or CS2 needs.