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From: craig@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Craig Wylie)
Newsgroups: net.lang.mod2
Subject: Re: Good book wanted
Message-ID: <465@comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 5-Oct-86 08:00:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: comp.465
Posted: Sun Oct  5 08:00:33 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Oct-86 00:05:42 EDT
References: <8800001@uiucdcsp> <312@luth2.UUCP>
Reply-To: craig@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Craig Wylie)
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.
Lines: 43

>In article <8800001@uiucdcsp> jenks@uiucdcsp.UUCP writes:
>>
>>Can anyone recommend a good beginning book on Modula-2 that can also be used
>>as a textbook (for a short seminar)?

In article <312@luth2.UUCP> d2c-mt@luth2.UUCP (Mikko Ty|l{j{rvi) writes:

>Try the original "Programming in modula-2" by Niklaus Wirth, the
>father of modula-2. (Springer Verlag). It is a good book on
>programming in general and modula-2 especially. Also at the end
>is included the "Report on The Programming Language Modula-2",
>ie the whole language in 40 pages.


I don't think this is a good book for beginers to Modula-2. The index
in both the first and second editions is poorly set out and far from
complete. There are now many good begginers guides to Modula-2 appearing,
unfortunately none to hand (:-) at the moment.

Further critisisms of Wirths book include poor examples and bad layout,
many of the examples being nothing more that updates on his Algorithms + ...
examples translated to Modula-2. The sections on sets (page 30 in edition 1
if you can't find it in the index) and on module nesting are completely
useless unless you really know what you are looking for.

The section on IO is a complete waste of time unless you have his compiler 
or one that sticks to the Lilth format. Any of the other different 
IO packages is lost. I accept that it would be impossible to produce
a book with a complete run down on all the different IO definition
modules, but if you are working with beginners to the language
expect to have to produce some of your own documentation. As an idea
it might be worth producing a new index. If you do I would love to
see it :-) :-)



Craig.
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