At first sight, Ada offers a bewildering variety of features. It is a powerful tool intended to solve difficult problems, and almost every feature has a legitimate application in some context. This makes it especially important to use Ada's features in a disciplined and organized way. Following the guidelines can make learning Ada easier and help you to master its apparent complexity. From the beginning, you can write programs that exploit the best features of the language in the way that the designers intended.

Programmers experienced in using other programming languages are often tempted to use Ada as if it were their familiar language but with irritating syntactic differences. This pitfall should be avoided at all costs; it can lead to convoluted code that subverts exactly those aspects of Ada that make it so suitable for building high-quality systems. You must learn to "think Ada." Following the guidelines in this book and reading the examples of their use will help you to do this as quickly and painlessly as possible.

To some degree, novice programmers learning Ada have an advantage. Following the guidelines from the beginning helps in developing a clear programming style that effectively exploits the language. If you are in this category, it is recommended that you adopt the guidelines for those exercises you perform as part of learning Ada. Initially, developing sound programming habits by concentrating on the guidelines themselves and their supporting examples is more important than understanding the rationale for each guideline.

The rationale for many of the guidelines helps experienced programmers understand and accept the suggestions presented in the guideline. Some of the guidelines themselves are also written for the experienced programmer who must make engineering tradeoffs. This is especially true in the areas of portability, reusability, and performance. These more difficult guidelines and rationale will make you aware of the issues affecting each programming decision. You can then use that awareness to recognize the engineering tradeoffs that you will eventually be asked to make when you are the experienced Ada programmer.