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From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal,comp.edu
Subject: Re: Pascal text (query)
Message-ID: <3725@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 12 Aug 89 15:55:43 GMT
References: <650@njitgw.njit.edu>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.lang.pascal
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 25

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..."