Learning resources

Hi All,
I am interested in learning Ada. I am basically java developer working on web technologies-springboot etc. I saw there are couple of books on Ada but confused from where to start.
What i am looking for is

  1. IDE(i know GNAT studio community edition) and book to begin.
  2. Should i go for Ada-95 or Ada-2012?
    3)Are there any Ada courses(like on Udemy/Udacity etc) to begin with?

Hi, and welcome.

  • 1 : There are mainly GNAT studio and VSCode with Ada plugin as IDE/editors but other solutions exist. There are books of course but you can also learn Ada online here.
  • 2 : The last standard is Ada 2022 but compilers do not implement all the new features. I’d recommend to use Ada 2012.
  • 3 : See point 1
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Thanks alot.
One more question- I see Ada mainly in Avionics/space domain. Any other domains where Ada being used? Web applications?cloud?

Have a look at Ada language and you’ll understand it can be used almost everywhere. This is a modern language.
What is limiting it’s use it the lack of big “libraries” like in some other languages. However, it is quite easy to interface to C libraries from Ada.
The Alire framework helps a lot to reuse Ada packages written by other devs.

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Ada is used in military, space, train systems, medical, financial and various other systems. It’s a general purpose language so it can be used in almost any application area. As far as web goes, there are some existing services like Ada Web Service (AWS…not to confuse with amazon). I’ve personally been using the Gnoga library for years now for web based solutions and even GUI in browser projects, so I recommend that, but there are other options.

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For those with experience in other languages, I recommend Ada Distilled. There is a free version for ISO/IEC 8652:2007 Ada and a version for Ada-12 from Amazon. I would recommend the Ada-12 version, but you could use the free version and learn the new features without much trouble.

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