Book excerpt: A major feature of the Ada programming language is the facilities it provides for concurrent programming. Alan Burns and Andy Wellings provide here a thorough and self-contained account of concurrent programming in Ada, and so show users, even beginners, how to harness the full power of the whole language. After giving an overview of the non-concurrent features of Ada, the authors proceed to examine in detail the uses of concurrent programming and the inherent difficulties in providing inter-process communication. The Ada tasking model is then introduced; the way it deals with these and related matters is explained in a number of separate chapters, covering system programming, real-time issues, distribution, object-oriented programming and re-use. This is the first book which deals with concurrent features in the new Ada standard, and it offers practical advice to the programmer needing to use it for embedded systems, while those interested more broadly in the development of programming languages will find many otherwise inaccessible issues probed in depth. It will thus be of value to professional software engineers and advanced students of programming alike; indeed, every Ada programmer will find it essential reading and a primary reference work. For the paperback edition the authors have made revisions throughout the text, updating and correcting where appropriate.