What’s this book all about? Well, it’s about how to develop software, from a personal perspective. We’ll
look at what it means for you to take a problem and produce a program to solve it from beginning to
end. That said, this book focuses a lot on design. How do you design software? What things do you take
into account? What makes a good design? What methods and processes are there to designing software?
Is designing small programs different from designing large ones? How can you tell a good design from a
bad one?
Next, it’s about code construction. How do you write programs and make them work? “What,”
you say? “I’ve already written eight gazillion programs! Of course I know how to write code!” Well, in this
book, we’ll explore what you already do, and we’ll investigate ways to improve on that. We’ll spend some
time on coding standards, debugging, unit testing, modularity, and characteristics of good programs.
We’ll also talk about reading code and what makes a program readable. Can good, readable code replace
documentation? How much documentation do you really need?
Third, it’s a bit about software engineering, which is usually defined as “the application of
engineering principles to the development of software.” What are “engineering principles?” Well, first,
all engineering efforts follow a defined process. So we’ll be spending a bit of time talking about how you
run a software development project and what phases there are to a project. All engineering work has a
basis in the application of science and mathematics to real-world problems. So does software
development. As I said already, we’ll be spending a lot of time examining how to design and implement
programs that solve specific problems.
By the way, there’s at least one person (besides me) who thinks software development is not an
engineering discipline. I’m referring to Alistair Cockburn, and you can read his paper, “The End of
Software Engineering and the Start of Economic-Cooperative Gaming” at
http://alistair.cockburn.us/The+end+of+software+engineering+and+the+start+of+economiccooperative+
gaming.
Finally, this book is about professional practice, the ethics and the responsibilities of being a
software developer, social issues, privacy, how to write secure and robust code, and the like. In short,
those fuzzy other things one needs in order to be a professional software developer.
This book covers many of the topics described for the ACM Computing Curricula 2001 course
C292c Software Development and Professional Practice (www.acm.org/education/education/curricularecommendations).
It is designed to be both a textbook and a manual for the working professional.
Although the chapter order generally follows the standard software development sequence, one can read
the chapters independently and out of order. I’m assuming that you already know how to program and
that you are conversant with at least one of Java, C, or C++. I’m also assuming you are familiar with basic
data structures, including lists, queues, stacks, maps, and trees, along with the algorithms to manipulate
them.