Engineering Long-Lasting Software: An Agile Approach Using SaaS and Cloud Computing, Beta Edition [Kindle Edition]

David Patterson (Author), Armando Fox (Author)

Book Description

(NOTE: this Beta Edition may contain errors. See http://saasbook.info for details.) A one-semester college course in software engineering focusing on cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), and Agile development using Extreme Programming (XP). This book is neither a step-by-step tutorial nor a reference book. Instead, our goal is to bring a diverse set of software engineering topics together into a single narrative, help readers understand the most important ideas through concrete examples and a learn-by-doing approach, and teach readers enough about each topic to get them started in the field. Courseware for doing the work in the book is available as a virtual machine image that can be downloaded or deployed in the cloud. A free MOOC (massively open online course) at saas-class.org follows the book's content and adds programming assignments and quizzes.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Armando Fox is an Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of the Berkeley AMP Lab. During his previous time at Stanford, he received teaching and mentoring awards from the Associated Students of Stanford University, the Society of Women Engineers, and Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society. He was named one of the "Scientific American 50" in 2003 and is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and the Gilbreth Lectureship of the National Academy of Engineering. In previous lives he helped design the Intel Pentium Pro microprocessor and founded a successful startup to commercialize his UC Berkeley dissertation research on mobile computing. He received his other degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and the University of Illinois and is an ACM Distinguished Member. David Patterson is the Pardee Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and is currently Director of the Parallel Computing Lab. In the past, he served as Chair of Berkeley's CS Division, Chair of the CRA, and President of the ACM. His best-known research projects are Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Network of Workstations (NOW). This research led to many papers, 5 books, and about 30 of honors, including election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame, and Fellow of the Computer History Museum. His teaching awards include the Distinguished Teaching Award (UC Berkeley), the Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (ACM), the Mulligan Education Medal (IEEE), and the Undergraduate Teaching Award (IEEE). He received all his degrees from UCLA.

Product Details

• File Size: 4877 KB
• Print Length: 412 pages
• Publisher: Strawberry Canyon LLC (August 24, 2012)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B006WU5G4C
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #136,403 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A good book on SaaS concepts based on examples in Ruby on Rails April 11, 2012

By Matija Han

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have bought this book as a supplement for the online UC Berkley course on Software as a Service, and it helped me a lot in absorbing all the covered concepts.

Beware of two things though: this is an Alpha version, so it is very rough, and about half done (half of the chapters are literally missing from the book), and the title is very vague, and doesn't give much info on actual subjects covered. This book provides a good primer in: Ruby, Rails, SaaS concepts and driving ideas, Agile SW development, Cloud computing, GIT usage, Herouku usage, Testing (unit, functional, integration) and Business analysis (all this is covered in the first half which can be found in this Alpha version). The full version promises to tackle a few more subjects, like working with legacy code.

The book comes with some extra material like webcasts and code snippets hosted at Pastebin. These can be quite useful, but are not accessible on all eBook devices.

Needless to say, it is very topic-rich, which results in superficial coverage at some places. Still, in my view it gives a very good basis for further improvement, and it bootstraps you to actually be able to deploy your first web application onto a public cloud server.

Considering the price for the Alpha, I feel it is worth the information you will find within. Also, consider taking the free SaaS class, just Google it :).

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars More of a reference book than a learning book June 15, 2012

By objective

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am currently taking the coursera class, and I am in the 3 1/2 week of this 5 weeks course. This is a good book as a very concise reference to the latest tools for saas programming with ruby on rails. But realistically, in order to take advantage of this book you need to already have a background in web programming. You really need to know CSS/HTML, understand client-server architecture, etc, etc. The book packs a lot of concepts in a few pages, and sometimes makes assumptions about knowledge of certain tools. I realized I was enjoying the book a lot until the Cucumber/Capybara BDD chapter because I already had experience with all the tools mentioned until then. But Cucumber was new to me, and the book basically spends 2 to 3 pages in giving examples and showing Cucumber commands and files without explaining how everything works together. I had to buy another book on Cucumber. And this point, I need to spend probably about a week understanding how Cucumber works before continuing reading the material. Also it looks like up to this chapter they took more care in explaining everything that they did, even if it was very concise, but once you hit this chapter, one is basically left to their own devices to figure out by reading other books what they are talking about. The book also could use an index, it doesn't have one, so if you want to find the pages that talk about certain subject you can't. Again, I wouldn't recommend this book to someone that has no experience in web-programming. Also the videos that come along with the book, are okay, but the quality is not so good. Especially when they show code, the display is too blurry, so you can't follow what the instructor is saying about the code. Overall, i found this book useful only as a reference to current tools and methodologies, but to really make use of it, you need to buy probably 3 or 4 other books to make up for the concepts they do not explain.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Companion Book April 10, 2012

By Douglas Bohnet

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is an alpha edition that goes along with a Berkley Course. Chapters six - ten are only stubs and there was no content with the version I bought (future updates are going to be provided, and will be much anticipated). The book worked very well along with other course materials, the appendix provides an excellent 'how to' on getting an application deployed to the Cloud.

I do not understand the harshness of other reviews; I was surprised at how effective Ruby/Rails/Cucumber provided as a learning platform and this book had brought the information together in an entertaining manner. The ease of setup, productivity and effectiveness of the tools presented are great.

You will not find a better guide on how to start building SaaS on the Cloud. I only wish this was taught when I was in my undergraduate program. Buy it!