The purpose of the Ada 95 Quality and Style Guidelines is to help computer professionals produce better Ada programs by identifying a set of stylistic guidelines that will directly impact the quality of their Ada 95 programs. This guide is ideally suited to be used in combination with the Ada 95 Reference Manual and the Ada 95 Rationale; both volumes also appeared in this series, as volumes 1246 and 1247 respectively. Together, these three volumes form an indispensable working companion for anyone using Ada professionally or learning the language systematically.

The style guide is divided into chapters that reflect the major points that a programmer addresses when creating high-quality, reliable, reusable and portable Ada software. Individual chapters are devoted to source code presentation, readability, program structure, programming practice, concurrency, portability, reusability, performance, and the new object-oriented features. Each chapter is divided into guidelines, whose contents are both prescriptive and tailorable. Many of the guidelines and examples are specific enough to be adopted as corporate or project programming standards.