Reviews for Mathematics of Program Construction

The average rating for Mathematics of Program Construction based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-17 00:00:00 Carol Gillespie I don't work in hard real time, safety critical, or embedded systems (although I did work on a simulator with a soft real time component). What this book did for me is to context switch to a different world where design decisions are very different from web applications in Java. In that sense it allowed me to look at the language features necessary to build better concurrent systems. (Better in the sense of amenable to analysis, predictable, and more deterministic.) Too often, as developers we see the world through the prism of our current work. It's nice to think about different types of problems and how those solutions may impact our current work to make it better. The first half of the book covers language features in Ada for concurrency. Unlike C and C++, until recently, where concurrency is a library add on, concurrency is built into the bones of Ada. The authors cover those basic language features to give the reader a solid grounding of tasking, protected, objects, communications, guards and how other standard language features interact with the concurrency model. The second half of the book covers more advanced features such as compiler settings, enabling/disabling language features, or optional libraries that govern how the language features operate at a lower level (i.e. control scheduling of tasks). They cover how these features allow Ada to create programs that are amenable to analysis or provably correct. What I did not like about the book an why it rates a 4 stars instead of 5 was the way some language features were introduced. In some cases the authors focused too much on the 'rules' around a language feature and could have provided a better motivating example. If you can slog through those few spots, the book is a good 'programmer's read'. By which I mean a lot of good, clear code examples to back up the narrative text. To read this book you should have at least a basic knowledge of Ada

Review # 2 was written on 2009-08-13 00:00:00 Dennis Ward Good