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"David D. Shochat" <[log in to unmask]>
Sat, 6 Feb 1999 08:34:14 -0500
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Dave Wood wrote:
>
> It's interesting that those who know something
> about Ada give it 5 stars, and those who know
> nothing (generally seem to be students) hate
> the book and give it 1 star.  Nothing in between.
>
> Looks more like a failure of the professors who
> assign a book not intended for students.  I recall,
> way back in ancient history, having a violently
> negative reaction to Wirth's Pascal book (which,
> to be fair, was pretty bad.) What they need is
> an actual textbook, not a practitioner's book.
>
When I was an Ada instructor back at my previous company I noticed that
people who needed to learn Ada and were free to use whatever book they
preferred all seemed to choose Barnes, and it wasn't the only thing
available. It may be significant that these were people who obviously
did *not* know Ada but were knowledgeable, experienced designers and
programmers in other languages. I also used Barnes to learn from. Sine
no compiler was available, it was helpful that it had worked examples in
the back. My only objection was that I/O was not introduced at the
beginning. This was of course the fairly thin Ada 83 version.

But it could be the case that Barnes is not the best book for
unsophisticated students who are just learning programming in general,
and some of the reviews may be coming from that population.
-- David

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