Ideal for use in a software engineering lab or special topics setting, Developing Real World Software is a practical guide for developing useful, real world software applications that are high performing, secure, reliable, and configurable. It expands upon material presented in traditional software engineering texts and focuses on key principles from a practical application development perspective so that students can experience all aspects of the process first-hand. The theme of encapsulation is stressed throughout the book as it explains how it can be utilized to tremendously improve the understandability of large real world programs.

This is not a book on the management of a software project. Many software engineering books cover that material. Similarly, many other books cover programming principles and object-oriented design. Instead, this book stresses and expands on those principles from a practical application development perspective. There is a large gap between what students typically cover in a college course and what they will see when they begin work on real applications. This book is intended to help fill that gap by tying together the various pieces of software design and programming knowledge that the reader has learned in various courses. It also covers topics such as error handling and design patterns for threads, which are often skipped in other books. While this book does not cover development frameworks such as .NET and Spring, if one understands the underlying principles found in this book it will be fairly straightforward to learn those types of systems.