History of Nigeria (1969) was first published in 1929 and completely revised by its author, and gives the history of Nigeria from before its first encounters with the British, through colonial rule, and up to independence in 1960. It describes the peoples of Nigeria and the British conquest and colonial administration, and is full of detailed and valuable information relating to trade and industry, transport, housing, land tenure, education, religion and tribal customs. Appendices feature royal genealogies and the texts of treaties.

Parliament as an Export (1966) deals with the adoption of overseas countries and particularly the Commonwealth countries of the British Parliamentary system. These countries examined are the original British colonies, the Dominions, the Indian sub-continent and the newer colonial territories.

History of the British West Indies (1954) examines the history of the islands of the Caribbean from their first discovery, through the periods of colonisation and slavery, and up to the beginnings of their status as independent nations. The actions of other nations are studied, as well as the British, as the various colonial powers vied for possession of these valuable possessions. Terrible cruelty was inflicted by colonial masters to the indigenous inhabitants, the slaves and indentured labour, and the worst of these are recorded in separate appendices.

Dreamerika!, Alan Burns's fourth novel, first published in 1972, provides a satirical look at the Kennedy political dynasty, serving up an idiosyncratic hotch-potch of history that gives an old tragedy new meaning. For this book, Burns collected newspaper clippings, headlines, cartoons and photographs, cut them up, filed them and then interspersed them throughout his text to create a collage of contrasting effects. Presented in a fragmented form that reflects society's disintegration, Dreamerika! fuses fact and dream, resulting in a surreal biography, an alternate history which lays bare the corruption and excesses of capitalism just as the heady idealism of the 1960s has begun to fade.

Ada* is unquestionably one of the most significant programming languages to emerge in the last decade. The manner of its inception and support by the US Department of Defense (DoD) ensures that it will be used extensively for the indefinite future in programming large and complex systems. The growing availability of compilers means that many organisations are already committed to using the language for sizable and significant applications. As a perhaps inevitable result of its design goals, Ada is a "large" language. It has Pascal-like control and type constructs; a mechanism for exception handling; a package structure for information hiding, decomposition and separate compilation; facilities for low-level programming; and a tasking model of concurrency. It is perhaps this last area that has generated most debate, criticism and disagreement. The purpose of this book is to review the tasking model in the light of the extensive analysis and comment which has appeared in the literature. The review is necessarily wide-ranging, including discussion of - Ada as a general purpose concurrent programming language, - Ada as a language for embedded and distributed systems, - implementation issues, with particular reference to distributed systems, - formal semantics, specification and verification, - proposed language modifications. By consolidating this discussion within the confines of a single review, potential users of the tasking facility are enabled to familiarise themselves with all the factors which may impinge upon the performance, reliability and correctness of their software. The book also provides a focus for any debate on modifications to the Ada language, or developments from it.

Buster was the first, and arguably the most traditional, work of fiction by Alan Burns - dating from before his aleatoric style developed into "cutting up", but displaying early examples of the trademark disjointed, brisk and biting style which earned him a cult following. Imbued with autobiographical sentiment, the novel shows a young man's upbringing during World War II and his disillusioned vision of the post-war world. Never before published in standalone volume form since its original publication in the inaugural New Writers anthology in 1961, Buster is characteristically succinct and of huge literary merit, but in its autobiographical and pre-aleatoric style it provides, perhaps more importantly, a key to understanding the rest of Burns's works.

Celebrations, Alan Burns's third novel, brings the inherent violence and oppression so apparent in Europe after the Rain into the setting of a family-owned factory, where social hierarchies, legal structures and humiliation keep the workers in line. By bringing the differences between workers sharply into focus, Burns creates a choking atmosphere of oppression and exploitation - heightened and upended by his trademark aleatoric style, peppering with seemingly random headlines and offcuts the text, which has not lost any of either its relevance or its acerbic bite in the intervening years.

Europe after the Rain takes its title from Max Ernst's surrealist work, which depicts a vision of rampant destruction - a theme which Burns here takes to its conclusion, showing man not merely trying to come to terms with desolation, but combating human cruelty with that resilience of spirit without which survival would be impossible. The Europe through which the unnamed narrator travels is a devastated world, twisted and misshapen, both geographically and morally, and he is forced to witness terrible sights, to which he brings an interested apathy, without ever succumbing to despair or cynicism. Upon the novel's first publication, Burns was heralded as presenting a picture of his age and capturing the `collective unconscious' of the twentieth century - in a language that can have few rivals for economy, beauty and rhythm. His austere sentences glow with intelligence, colour and force, and evoke a powerful image for the modern reader of fears every bit as relevant today as on the day when they were written.

Babel, Alan Burns's fourth critically acclaimed novel, contains all the hallmarks of the aleatoric style he helped to define - shot through with seemingly random newspaper headlines, poems, snatches of conversation and anecdote, which both heighten and undermine meaning, and characterized by extreme contrasts of mood and style and startling surrealist juxtapositions of images and ideas. By turns comic and tragic, tender and brutal, religious and blasphemous, the narrative rockets from London to the United States to Vietnam to interstellar space, familiar events are constantly fragmented and reset into new patterns, and ultimately Babel becomes a cautionary tale about the tragedy arising from attempting to build Utopia.

Ada is the only ISO-standard, object-oriented, concurrent, real-time programming language. It is intended for use in large, long-lived applications where reliability and efficiency are essential, particularly real-time and embedded systems. In this book, Alan Burns and Andy Wellings give a thorough, self-contained account of how the Ada tasking model can be used to construct a wide range of concurrent and real-time systems. This is the only book that focuses on an in-depth discussion of the Ada tasking model. Following on from the authors' earlier title Concurrency in Ada, this book brings the discussion up to date to include the new Ada 2005 language and the recent advances in real-time programming techniques. It will be of value to software professionals and advanced students of programming alike: indeed every Ada programmer will find it essential reading and a primary reference work that will sit alongside the language reference manual.