Customer Reviews

Software Engineering for Internet Applications

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If you're new to building web applications and want a balanced perspective on the engineering challenges involved -- from understanding user needs to data modelling to scaling gracefully -- this book is a great place to start. It's mostly language-agnostic, so it'll be a good starting point for a few years but won't update you on the latest technology. Nevertheless, I know very few web developers who wouldn't learn something important from a careful reading of this book.

Where this book really shines is as a bridge from the world of college Computer Science to the world of actually building applications people use. This transition encompasses understanding your users, making flexibile designs, considering security, aesthetics, and a host of other issues one does not actually learn in a normal college CS curriculum. Thanks to its project focus, this book (and the course curriculum it implies) seeds an awareness of these many issues that can later be developed through experience. Other "software engineering" books over-emphasize theories, but this one will actually press you to get stuff built.

This book is helpful for programmers as well as people who work more generally with technology. I'm using very specific, technical information from the "Adding Mobile Users to Your Community" chapter for a web application I'm building, while using concepts from the chapter on discussion forums for a research project on how discussion tools are used at my university. If you build web applications, or work with people who do, I highly recommend this book.

This is a terrific book on what it takes to make web applications really work (both for users and for the businesses that create them). Managers of web design projects should read this book for its eminently practical advice on documentation, workflow, and pitfalls to avoid. Highly recommended.

It's not easy to build a really good online community website. There are a lot of things to think about, and many of them have little or nothing to do with technical programming skills.

Buy this book, read it, step through it, and learn from some of the best teachers on the subject. And then when you've learned what they have to say here, take your new-found skills and build your own online community site. Using the methods in this book, your web sites can be more useful, successful, and profitable.

To Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, I learn of this new chapter in Mr. Greenspun's (et al) effort to encourage the Web to be all it can be. This volume is plainly a text book, designed as a practicum, and with its completion my understanding of how to achieve what's possible now and conjure the future of the Web will be greatly furthered. I'm finding it inspirational in the process of designing; expand your dream's horizons!

This book does not provide any new material about the title topic. I returned it