First reviews the principles of library construction and the object-oriented techniques that make it possible to build high-quality libraries - e.g., finding the right objects and classes, choosing the proper names, using inheritance properly, determining the ideal class size, etc. Then provides detailed usage descriptions of hundreds of reusable components, offering thousands of directly usable operations. The components, written in Eiffel, cover such areas as lists, chains, queues, stacks, trees of various kinds, sorted structures, lexical analysis, parsing, and many other fundamental data structures and algorithms. For both the users of reusable software libraries and for developers who are interested in building their own libraries of reusable software.
Bertrand Meyer is Chief Architect of Eiffel Software (based in California, http://eiffel.com) and Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
He is the initial designer of the Eiffel method and language and has continued to participate in its evolution. He also directed the development of the EiffelStudio environment, compiler, tools and libraries through their successive versions.
His latest book, Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well, Using Object Technology and Contracts, is based on several years of teaching introductory programming at ETH and is scheduled for publication on August 9, published by Springer Verlag (see Amazon page and Springer page).
Earlier books include "Object-Oriented Software Construction" (a general presentation of object technology, winner of the 1998 Jolt Award); "Eiffel: The Language" (description of the Eiffel language); "Object Success" (a discussion of object technology for managers); "Reusable Software" (a discussion of reuse issues and solutions); "Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages". He has also authored numerous articles (see publication list) and edited or co-edited several dozen conference proceedings, including the 2005 "Verified Software".
Other activities include: chair of the TOOLS conference series (running since 1989, hosted at ETH since 2007, next year session in Malaga, Spain); director of the LASER summer school on software engineering (taking place every year since 2003 in early September in Elba island, Italy); member, and chair since 2009, of the IFIP TC2 committee (Software technology); member of the IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology; member of the French Academy of Technologies. He is also active as a consultant (object-oriented system design, architectural reviews, technology assessment), trainer in object technology and other software topics, and conference speaker. Awards include ACM Software System Award, Fellow of the ACM, Dahl-Nygaard Prize, and honorary doctorate from the Technical University (ITMO) of Saint Petersburg.
Prior to founding Eiffel Software in 1985, Meyer had a 9-year technical and managerial career at EDF, and was for three years on the faculty at the University of California. His experience with object technology through the Simula language, as well as early work on abstract data types and formal specification (including participation in the first versions of the Z specification language) provided some of the background for the development of Eiffel.
At ETH Zurich he pursues research on the construction of high-quality software (see Web site of the Chair of Software Engineering at http://se.ethz.ch).
