Software Engineering: (Update) (8th Edition) [Hardcover]

Ian Sommerville (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321313798 | ISBN-13: 978-0321313799 | Publication Date: June 4, 2006 | Edition: 8

THE most current Software Engineering text in the market– quality trusted coverage, practical case studies, strong lecturer support.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

 

SOMMERVILLE

Software Engineering 8

 

The eighth edition of the best-selling introduction to software engineering is now updated with three new chapters on state-of-the-art topics.

 

New chapters in the 8th edition

 

Ø      Security engineering, showing youhow you can design software to resist attacks and recover from damage;

Ø      Service-oriented software engineering, explaininghow reusable web services can be used to develop new applications;

Ø      Aspect-oriented software development, introducing new techniques based on the separation of concerns.

 

Key features

 

Ø      Includes the latest developments in software engineering theory and practice, integrated with relevant aspects of systems engineering.

Ø      Extensive coverage ofagile methods andreuse.

Ø      Integrated coverage of system safety, security and reliability – illustrating best practice in developing critical systems.

Ø      Two running case studies (an information system and a control system) illuminate different stages of thesoftware lifecycle.

 

Online resources

 

Visit www.pearsoned.co.uk/sommerville to access a full range of resources for students and instructors.

 

In addition, a rich collection of resources including links to other web sites, teaching material on related courses and additional chapters is available at http://www.software-engin.com.

 

 

IAN SOMMERVILLE is Professor of Software Engineering at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

 

 

Product Details

• Hardcover: 864 pages
• Publisher: Addison Wesley; 8 edition (June 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321313798
• ISBN-13: 978-0321313799
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #129,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too much repetition, May 3, 2008

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Software Engineering: (Update) (8th Edition) (Hardcover)

I used this book as the text in my software engineering class in the spring semester of 2008. When I was evaluating it for potential adoption, I did not read through it in detail, I looked over the chapter titles and subtitles, read the first few chapters and examined the exercises at the end of the first few chapters. As the semester progressed, I found myself wishing I had read further into the text.
As I moved through the chapters, I found myself mentally noting over and over again that topics are repeated. When the class was over, I asked the students their opinion of the book and they were unanimous, with no prompting from me, in saying that there is a great deal of repetition after the first chapters.
I have no complaint about the quality of exposition or the coverage of software engineering in this book. My reason for not continuing to use it in future classes is solely due to my belief that the size could have been reduced from the current 840 pages to around 600 pages with no real loss of content of flow.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good high-level book, April 10, 2007

By 

G. L. Sinsley (Pleasant Gap, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Software Engineering: (Update) (8th Edition) (Hardcover)

This is a good high-level book for a first software engineering course. It mentions things like critical systems, object oriented programming, and real -time systems, but at a very high level; so it should not be used for a specialized course. It provides many helpful examples and diagrams. My only complaint is that the chapters are very long, and a lot of things are repeated several times. I think this book could easily be 75% shorter without loosing any important information.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars see new chapters on Web Services and Aspect programming, December 25, 2006

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Software Engineering: (Update) (8th Edition) (Hardcover)

It has been 2 years since Sommerville put out the 7th edition of this book. So what has changed? Three new chapters have been added at the end of the 8th edition.

One is entitled "Service-oriented software engineering". All about Web Services, which is a burgeoning field. The 7th edition just had a relatively brief explanation about XML and the sundry services developing atop it. Now the 8th edition goes into those, like the Web Service Description Language, and the Business Process Execution Language. To be sure, the chapter is not an exhaustive explanation of the syntax and usages of these languages. For that, you need to consult books devoted to them (and these do indeed exist). Rather, the chapter furnishes a concise overview that gives you the essence of what they can do. I actually think the chapter should have been simply called "Web Services". The actual title, while accurate, is too indirect.

Another new chapter looks at aspect oriented programming. Again, just an overview. But it does convey accurately what AOP offers. Centred around the key idea of cross cutting concerns. And that conventional object oriented code tends inevitably to have closely related code scattered thru many classes; making maintenance harder. It is by no means clear that AOP will ever become common. But it is one of the most intriguing ideas to arise recently, and Sommerville is correct in explaining it.

In the existing chapters brought over from the 7th edition, I do still disagree with his remarks on Extreme Programming. While XP does have some laudatory features, I take issue with the constant refactoring and the pair programming, as well as having a customer onsite at the developers' place. The latter is simply not realistic in some projects.

While pair programming, and not having programmers responsible for specific parts of the code, totally ignores different levels of expertise. Some programmers are simply better (or more experienced) than others. A real danger is having 2 neophyte programmers unwork complex code made by a senior programmer, that they simply did not understand. If you have done any programming, you will encounter subroutines that are highly intricate and intrinsically hard to understand. Typically, these subroutines are only a small part of the total code. But they might play a crucial part. They should be associated with specific programmers, who are responsible for them.

Another reason against pair programming is when the programmers are not just "pure" programmers. They might have backgrounds in various engineering or scientific fields, where this background is needed for the project. So a programmer/engineer versed in mechanical design, and who has to code accordingly, has different responsibilities from another programmer who has to deal with modelling the electrical circuitry, for example. At the design level, it makes eminent sense to sometimes pair these, when the domains overlap. But at the programming level, each can't usually do the other's work.