parker@mars.njit.edu (bruce parker cis fac) (07/19/89)
Students at NJIT use an IBM-PC clone and will shortly be using Turbo Pascal 5.0. In general, they do NOT have the Borland manuals (at least as far as I can tell). My problem is this: while getting the Borland documentation to the students is important, the books are lousy for teaching. They are (as should be expected) written by committee. I need to find a decent textbook for Turbo Pascal which covers topics typical for a second course in programming, e.g., more advanced features of Turbo Pascal such as dynamic structures, recursion, abstract data types using units, as well as some sort of overview or reference level guide to using Turbo 5.0 or 5.5 Pascal's editor, the make and build functions, and the debugger. Any suggestions? Cheers, Bruce Parker 305 Weston Hall (201) 596-3369 Computer and Information Science Department parker@mars.njit.edu New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark, New Jersey 07102 Bruce Parker 305 Weston Hall (201) 596-3369 Computer and Information Science Department parker@mars.njit.edu New Jersey Institute of Technology
bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton) (08/12/89)
In article <650@njitgw.njit.edu> parker@mars.njit.edu (bruce parker cis fac) writes: >Students at NJIT use an IBM-PC clone and will shortly be using Turbo Pascal 5.0. >In general, they do NOT have the Borland manuals (at least as far as I can >tell). > >My problem is this: while getting the Borland documentation to the students >is important, the books are lousy for teaching. > >Any suggestions? Borland's manuals are _documentation_, not texts. GET THEM! Turbo Pascal, while a semi-user-friendly programming environment, is nonetheless a typically misfeature-bloated Pascal implementation. Without the actual manual, students will beat themselves silly trying to track down bugs and to write routines for which library procedures exist. Further, these kids aren't going to be using Turbo all their lives. Get a book on generic Pascal, and plenty of copies of the Turbo docs. --Blair "Then chuck them all and teach C, fer gosh sakes..."