Favourite books about Ada/Spark

General
22

I just remembered I looked into the availability of the 2012 edition of Ada Distilled some time ago and only saw a Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Is it available as a PDF? Amazon does not allow PDFs, but there are self-publishing platforms that support multiple formats. If someone is in contact with the author, perhaps this could be discussed.

23

I read Principles of concurrent and distributed programming, by Ben-ari too. Very good author overall, if challenging. Especially alone. Does anyone possess the supplementary materials for instructors, including all the exercises’ solutions ? They are not for free on Pearson’s site.

24

I found the Kindle version of Ada Distilled incredibly difficult to work with due to formatting problems making some of the text unreadable, so much that I abandoned it.

25

There are two cases:

  • You want to learn from the code, e.g. an algorithm or some principle;
  • You want to understand the code.

They are very different in the level of commenting and what is being commented. The second case requires almost no comments. You simply must ask yourself “how would I do it?” and compare it with the code. Similar goes to the language features and the level of how much the language reference reveals. This why there are annotated reference manuals and language rationales.

Learning from production code as well as confusing teaching examples with the former are bad ideas.