Customer Reviews

Software Engineering (7th Edition)

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

 

 

Software engineering is to computer science what engineering is to physics, as the author suggests. Here, the emphasis is on a higher level than, say, the crafting of algorithms. The scope is for systems analysis, design and implementation. He explains that the traditional waterfall method had many shortcomings. Its monolithic stages often proved unwieldy.

The book goes into alternatives. It also gives a good overall treatment of such ideas as formal specification and architectural design. With an entire chapter focusing on the key ways to have distributed systems architectures. Unsurprisingly, CORBA gets the most extensive description. A reflection of the amount of effort that has gone into using it since the late 80s. However, there is scant mention of its drawbacks. Most important of which has been that the exchange of binary data has been very brittle.

He mentions p2p and Web Services, as contrasting approaches. Where the latter uses XML to exchange data in a readable format. This has been widely seen as a big advantage over CORBA, but the book doesn't mention it. Given the continued rise in Web Services, perhaps a future edition of the book could give it more coverage?

The most controversial part of the text might be the section on Extreme Programming. Its characteristics are well described. But perhaps not enough on its disadvantages. Like the idea of collective ownership of code. Not all programmers have the same ability or expertise. Some programmers are far better than others. It is very bad to have a tyro unwittingly change code for which she has insufficient understanding. While the author may not necessarily agree with this, he should at least describe it.

Other sections of the book, especially on testing software and validating critical system parts, are quite lucid and should excite little disagreement.

Concise is the best word to describe it. Software Engineering covers a broad range of topics - what are software engineers, documentation, designing, architecture (types and methods) - this book is pretty much my bible on all things software engineering.

Here are some of my recommendations:

Professors: This book is best accompanied if you assign a semester long project. My prof did this and it placed the book into a different light. Half the things don't make sense if you simply read the book such as Data Flow Models or even Project Management, but when you assign a project and coincide the project with the material in the book, it's 100 times more helpful and it elucidates the material more and more.

Students: This book covers a lot, so get ready to learn new terms and methods. This book covers Project Management, which helped me out alot. For the most part, it gives you good material on how to write good documentation as well as methods and styles for how to design or architect software. Read, read, read is the best advice I can give you.

Overall, Amazon's ratings go only as far as 5 stars, I'd give this book a 10. It's a keeper in my library and a book that I'll be referencing for years to come.

A great introductory book on software engineering. It gives you a holistic view of software engineering, but lacks in details. It won't teach you how to draw ER diagrams but it will tell you what they are.

Sommerville undoubtedly owns great knowledge over the topic. Unfortunately he has difficulties to write monolithicly. Most of the time he is beating around the bush. The examples he uses to explain the different topics are rather unusual and do not help to better understand what the techniques are all about.
More detailed and concrete examples would have been helpful.
I expected more from the Guru of Software-Engineering...

Overview of Software Engineering, with a brief explanation of software process and project management. It mainly covers the design issue and introduces the method of handling critical system.