Favourite books about Ada/Spark

General
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Programming in Ada 20xx by John Barnes
Ada Distilled by Richard Riehle

https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming

Please list any favourites or references that you personally turn to?

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I don’t know about you, but I really like ada-lang.io :slight_smile:

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Here my personal bookmarks:
http://www.opimedia.be/DS/Ada/

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That’s a quite useful linkfarm. Though I have to say some links point to access restricted walled gardens like adaic·org¹. I suggest prefixing adaic URLs with https://web.archive.org/web/ so the page is world-viewable to all comers.

  1. adaic is a siteground site that blocks some visitors with “Our system thinks you might be a robot!” This makes that link unsuitable for sharing outside of the siteground walled garden.

To answer the OP, Ada as a Second Language by Cohen has to be my top pick.

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Thanks
I haven’t read any of these but came across them whilst looking for an Ada book specifically about microprocessors, which they are not ha ha.

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Thank You. That book is very useful.

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For some reason I thought I’d read that Barnes wasn’t writing a new edition of his excellent book for Ada 2022. Very glad to see I was wrong.

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And if you’re a member of Ada-Europe, you can order John’s new book with a significant discount… (I don’t have the details handy now, info was handed out at the recent Ada-Europe conference in Barcelona.)

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Woah! Really? I requested to be added as a member of Ada-Spain a few months ago, which I think will also make me a member of Ada-Europe. Do you know how can you get this discount?

Incidentally, I have this book on pre-order on Amazon since about June, but the delivery date keeps sliding… last I saw it was October 7th. Now its going to be November?? :sweat_smile:

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Maybe this topic is not the most suitable for the question: what happened to www.ada-auth.org? It has not been available for some time (from Hungary).
It is not available from a browser, it just waits, even with wget it just waits for connection.
Another interesting thing is that the main page of www.adaic.org also loads incorrectly: a completely blank page with a gray bar at the top. Someone mentioned here earlier that this is a siteground page. What exactly does this mean?
Are there any access restrictions to these websites?

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AFAIK the webmasters of both pages have already been contacted :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the info! Good to know it’s not a local problem.

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Will John Barnes new version cover upcoming features like parallel or just the released features :thinking:

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From the description:

The latest version of ‘Programming in Ada’ covers the full details of the core language Ada 2022 as approved by ISO in 2023, including new features that aid program proof and the efficient use of multicore architectures. The book is arranged in four parts. The first part introduces the key ideas to the newcomer with a working example illustrating the basic ideas. The algorithmic features, structural features such as OOP and multitasking, and details of the standard library and interaction with the external environment are all covered in subsequent parts. This comprehensive guide includes several working examples and is enhanced by a range of supplementary online materials, including a dozen complete executable programs, five of which illustrate important new features. ‘Programming in Ada’ is a must-have for anyone looking to learn Ada programming language, and will serve as a definitive reference for years to come.

Sorry I didn’t include a link earlier. I thought I had.

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What do you all think of Ada for software engineers by Ben Ari ? I have it, it seems very thorough and all, but the very first program I compiled from its sourcecode, dot2dot, a graphviz format reader, is defectuous. Compiling but failing to display elementary graphs.
I was written in Ada2005, with some things annoying a 2022 norm. If the book is worth it, I was wondering if we could update its code exemples, make it work again as intended ? But it’s honestly above my paygrade, grammar errors is one thing, but complex errors, no.
or shall I keep with Barnes book ?

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I started reading Ben-Ari’s Ada for Software Engineers it and got a few good chapters into it (it’s waiting on the shelf for now).

The book’s strength seemed to be that it treats you as a serious person - from the start, you are shown non-trivial code and asked to write non-fizzbuzz programs.

The weakness, as you noticed, is that there may are issues with the program code available on the publisher’s website, as well as discrepancies between the code and the book. For example, the first interesting problem of filling and justifying text appears in Chapter 4. You are thrown straight into dealing with Ada Strings (an interesting choice) and the code in the book or on the website (or both, I don’t remember which), does more than is discussed in text (namely, does some additional framing). The quality/readability of that early code was subpar in my opinion - it was too complicated and not what I would ever write if I wanted maintainability.

Given the serious nature of the projects the reader is asked to analyze or write - I remember writing some array algorithms for image processing and a quaternions library - I think the book is worth spending time with.
The caveat is that the book treats its reader as a software engineer and expects them to act like one; if a project is asking you to write quaternions code, and you don’t know quaternion mathematics, you will have to spend some time with a book on quaternions (like I did).

I also note that while I think the book is nice, I would never pay the price the notorious Springer racket is asking for it. Borrow it from a library.

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There’s a PDF here, with the caveat

You may download, display and print one copy for your personal use in non-commercial academic research and teaching. Instructors in non-commerical academic institutions may make one copy
for each student in his/her class. All other rights reserved. In particular, posting this document on
web sites is prohibited without the express permission of the author.

So if that applies to people, they can obtain a free copy.

(You have to display the document to read that, so I presume that displaying the file in order to read that is OK.)

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I can try and code anything if the instructions are clear…He rather goes like “so you gotta something like that somewhat like this, somehow.”. An exemple:

One way of implementing a text editor is to use an array, storing the characters in front of the cursor at the beginning of the array and the characters after the cursor at the end of the array. Define an appropriate data structure using a discriminated record and implement the relevant operations on the data structure.

What does it mean ? Shall I code an entire text editor complete with TUI ? That’s a hella lot more than storing a string. Do I get one line at time from a file ? Then I don’t see what the discriminant is meant for. The readability does not improve later. Which sucks when you’re meant to learn from it.

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I haven’t read that chapter so I can’t comment on how appropriate this exercise is, but it appears straightforward even without that context:

  1. The text does not ask for a complete text editor. It only talks about the underlying data structure which is the essence of a text editor (and most programs).
  2. It comments on how you can do it - using an array of characters.
  3. The proposal is to store all characters in contiguous memory and treat the cursor as an iterator.
  4. It tells you to use a discriminated record - perhaps the discriminant is the buffer/array size?
  5. Relevant text editor operations - read into buffer, find, insert, erase, save to file?

I exercised certain autonomy and imagination and made a number of assumptions above that may be incorrect. That doesn’t matter because the drill is not to reinvent vi but to practice working with arrays or records or whatever this chapter is about.

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