Customer Reviews

Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This book is like a bloated piece of software. The author wastes so much of the book describing outdated methods and does not even seem to understand current methods. For example, many of the chapters describe procedural programming techniques such as data flow diagrams and then give a brief inaccurate description of modern techniques such as UML. The author also makes a big deal about comparing "traditional" programming and object oriented. Given that object oriented has been the dominant style for about 20 years, it just seems irrelevant to discuss it so much in the book. The examples in the book are also very confusing and hard to relate to. Instead of picking something simple that everybody knows like a banking system, he often uses something like a convoluted sensor system. This is just a horrible book and it's unfortunate that many CS students have to get stuck using it.

This book is unreadable. I'm just three chapters in, and I can't bear the thought of having to read more. Nearly every paragraph is inflated with buzzwords, obscure new phases and acronyms. The author drones on and on about archaic software models when a simple table and summary of each would suffice. Pressman writes almost as if he is trying to fill a word quota.

Before reading this book, I believed software engineering was dead. And after reading some of this book, I now know why: Software Engineering == Software Bureaucracy.

Potential buyers of this book might want to read the article "Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?" by Tom DeMarco.

This book was purchased as a required text for a master's level class, and I am highly disappointed in it.

The book broadly and superficially covers all software engineering concepts, and to the untrained reader might appear to be a comprehensive text. Just don't look too closely. If you know absolutely nothing about the software engineering process, and want to have a high level grasp of the uniqueness that is software, then this book could be of use. The descriptions do a good job of introducing SE concepts and theories, although some are dated.

If you are tasked with developing a software engineering strategy, or running a software-intensive project, or are looking to build a solid foundation and understanding of the software engineering process, walk away. Just walk away. This book introduces new terms, redefining widely and commonly used words for the software development life cycle and others. The entire SE body of knowledge uses certain words that students and practitioners get used to, and this author seems to change them around just to be different. Furthermore, the author interchanges these terms around, and is not consistent when referring to the same concept. Not something I'd expect to see after 7 revisions.

no more or less than what was described...the book is in great condition and arrived quickly. It is also the right edition as requested.

Unfortunately this book is required for me as an Undergraduate CS Major. While I would agree that Software Engineering is a respectable field worthy of study, this book, to me, is not.

Initially reading the first chapter it doesn't seem so bad, but as you go on, the other chapters pile on lists and procedures that seemingly contain the same steps/names. There are so many processes to analyze and refine your own "design" that it becomes a complete burden to remember them all. They are ambiguously named and after about 5 minutes they all seem to blend into one another leaving you lost and confused. I feel as if in the working world I'm not going to be burdened by having to remember the exact stages of how I should plan out every bit of my software design and that the miles of irrelevant and interconnected listings could easily be replaced by simple instructions of do's/don'ts.

The book also likes to reference certain structures or designs and fails to provide any real life examples that would fit. I.e. Data Centered Architecture VS. Client-Server Architecture.

This book is a waste of money. I still can't understand why universities use this book as recommended text for software engineering eventhough there are great books with great examples and precise explanation about this subject.

There is no real code in this book!, I really hate it

This book has a ton of information, but the writing is so drab and repetitive that it's painful to read. I really wish that I didn't have to read this book for class, but what I'm doing is reading the main ideas from Wikipedia and the IBM UML series then going through the book and reading, because the book doesn't give a very good basis for a lot of their explanations.

To be fair, I haven't read most of the book, and have only been using it for about three weeks in a course I'm taking. But so far, the book seems to just be about buzzwords and trends that are sure to pass with time. It reminds me of a management class I took two years ago, but in that class, the instructor even acknowledged that most of the things covered were just buzzwords and fads. I thought this class was going to be about design patterns and various best practices, but instead I'm force fed all this management and organization mumbo-jumbo. This book is also filled with a crap-load of idealized graphs and diagrams that aren't based on any real data. That kind of stuff always annoys me.

While I think it may be worthwhile to briefly cover these methodologies to get some ideas, actually following a methodology "to-a-T" seems like a bad idea, and could possibly cripple innovation and creativity. Most of the premises behind the ideas seem to be common sense any way. Of course a business should monitor its performance, try to constantly improve it's processes, efficiently allocate resources, etc... I don't need a book full of pre-packaged methodologies to tell me that.

Also, I haven't yet entered the "real-world" yet, so I may have no idea what I'm talking about. But I would probably hate working for a company that strictly followed most of the methodologies presented in this book.

I wanted read this with my iPad. I paid almost $100 and I can't read this with iPad! Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.

The description of the item stated it was 'good' and when I received the book the only damage was a few minor scratches on the cover. And after ordering it, I received the book in less than one week!