This first part covers the background to the Ada language and an overview of most of its features. Enough material is presented here to enable a programmer to write complete simple programs.

Chapter 1 contains a short historical account of the origins and development of various versions of Ada from Ada 83 through Ada 95 and Ada 2005 and leading to Ada 2012 which is the topic of this book. There is also a general discussion of how the evolution of abstraction has been an important key to the development of programming languages in general.

Broadly speaking, the other three chapters in this part provide an overview of the material in the corresponding other parts of the book. Thus Chapter 2 describes the simple concepts familiar from languages such as C and Pascal and which form the subject of the seven chapters which comprise Part 2. Similarly Chapter 3 covers the important topic of abstraction which is the main theme of Part 3. And then Chapter 4 rounds off the overview by showing how a complete program is put together and corresponds to Part 4 which covers material such as the predefined library.

Chapter 3 includes a discussion of the popular topic of object oriented programming and illustrates the key concepts of classes as groups of related types, of type extension and inheritance as well as static polymorphism (genericity) and dynamic polymorphism leading to dynamic binding. It also includes a brief comparison between the terminology used by Ada and that used by some other languages. This chapter concludes with an introduction to tasking which is a very important aspect of Ada and is a topic not addressed by most programming languages at all.

This part concludes with the first of a number of complete programs designed to give the reader a better understanding of the way the various components of the language fit together. This particular program illustrates a number of aspects of type extension and polymorphism.

Those not familiar with Ada will find that this part will give them a fair idea of Ada's capabilities and lays the foundation for understanding the details presented in the remainder of the book.