Customer Reviews

Essentials of Software Engineering, Second Edition

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I teach a course in software engineering nearly every year, and am always trolling for a new and better textbook. This book does not come close to satisfying my needs. While the breadth of the coverage is adequate, the depth is too shallow. If the course were structured so that the students read the book and took the test, then it would probably be minimally adequate. However, I have them develop and describe a software project using UML and only three pages of this book are devoted to UML diagrams. This is nowhere near enough for explaining what is nearly the standard means of expressing software development.
While I commend the authors for including a chapter on software maintenance, it also covers software support and is only twenty pages long. I really have no desire to teach my students how to accept and manage customer support calls. And quite frankly, they have no desire to learn how to do it. These weaknesses are unfortunate, because I found the book to be the most readable of the software engineering texts that I have examined. Very little code appears in the book, three pages are devoted to function point estimation and the phrase lines of code (LOC) doesn't even appear in the index. I also could not find the word metric anywhere in the index.

It is hard making a subject like software engineering sound interesting... not that this book does. It is broken up well and I found that I rarely had to search for other concepts online because they were well explained. It describes many different methodologies, but I would liked for it to have explained which methodologies are used by which types of projects a bit more.

I am a recent college graduate with a degree in physics. I have some programming experience, but I was looking for a way to organize the structure of my future programs. That is where Essentials of Software Engineering comes in. This book starts with the broad view of the software creation process, then dives into the details of each step.

If you are looking for a book to teach you about building software projects, this is a great choice.

The book arrived in just a short two days, and it was in great condition.