Ada (ISO/IEC 8652:1995)
Intro to standard
Ada is a programming language that is designed with big projects and robust programs in mind. USAs DOD wanted to stanardize on a programming language, but couldn't find any language that filled all their requirments. They chose to make a new language, Ada. The first version became an ANSI standard in 1983 and a FIPS and ISO standard in 1987. A new version became an ISO standard in 1995 (often called Ada95).Ada95 has support for multitasking, hierarcical structured modules, object oriented programming and strong typing (just to mention a little bit). It is very standaraised (there is even made specifications for some optional packages), and therefor very portable.
Standard-resources
The standard organization ISO is on-line. They offer several documents for sale.BUT we are on the net! You can get the Ada Language Reference Manual, the Rationale (which can be used as an intro to Ada) and several other interesting documents on-line in several different formats (ascii/postscript/html/...) for free!
The main page for people interested in Ada is probably The HBAP WWW Server. Here you can find references to most (all?) ada resources on the net. It is that web-server that has the Ada-Related FAQ-list. You may also want to have a look on the ACM's SIG Ada
If you feel that you can squeeze some money out of your employee and wants to go to a conference... take a look on this list of events. If you can't squeeze any money out of him/her, maybe you need a free Ada-compiler (FTP) and some free source-code from the Public Ada Library.
The source for on-line discussions is the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.ada.