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Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
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Design of Design, The: Essays from a Computer Scientist 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by Frederick P. Jr. Brooks (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 105 ratings
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Making Sense of Design

 

Effective design is at the heart of everything from software development to engineering to architecture. But what do we really know about the design process? What leads to effective, elegant designs? The Design of Design addresses these questions.

 

These new essays by Fred Brooks contain extraordinary insights for designers in every discipline. Brooks pinpoints constants inherent in all design projects and uncovers processes and patterns likely to lead to excellence. Drawing on conversations with dozens of exceptional designers, as well as his own experiences in several design domains, Brooks observes that bold design decisions lead to better outcomes.

 

The author tracks the evolution of the design process, treats collaborative and distributed design, and illuminates what makes a truly great designer. He examines the nuts and bolts of design processes, including budget constraints of many kinds, aesthetics, design empiricism, and tools, and grounds this discussion in his own real-world examples—case studies ranging from home construction to IBM’s Operating System/360. Throughout, Brooks reveals keys to success that every designer, design project manager, and design researcher should know.

 

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  1. ISBN-13
    978-0201362985
  2. Edition
    1st
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Addison-Wesley Professional
  5. Publication date
    March 22, 2010
  6. Language
    English
  7. File size
    3937 KB
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Making Sense of Design

Effective design is at the heart of everything from software development to engineering to architecture. But what do we really know about the design process? What leads to effective, elegant designs? The Design of Design addresses these questions.

These new essays by Fred Brooks contain extraordinary insights for designers in every discipline. Brooks pinpoints constants inherent in all design projects and uncovers processes and patterns likely to lead to excellence. Drawing on conversations with dozens of exceptional designers, as well as his own experiences in several design domains, Brooks observes that bold design decisions lead to better outcomes.

The author tracks the evolution of the design process, treats collaborative and distributed design, and illuminates what makes a truly great designer. He examines the nuts and bolts of design processes, including budget constraints of many kinds, aesthetics, design empiricism, and tools, and grounds this discussion in his own real-world examples―case studies ranging from home construction to IBM's Operating System/360. Throughout, Brooks reveals keys to success that every designer, design project manager, and design researcher should know.

About the Author

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., is Kenan Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, for his work on IBM’s Operating System/360, and the A. M. Turing Award, for his “landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.” He is the author of the best-selling book The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition (Addison-Wesley, 1995).

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003DKG5H6
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition (March 22, 2010)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 22, 2010
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 3937 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 521 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 105 ratings

About the author

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Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

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Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., is Kenan Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was an architect of the IBM Stretch and Harvest computers. He was Corporate Project Manager for the System/360, including development of the System/360 computer family hardware and the decision to switch computer byte size from 6 to 8 bits. He then managed the initial development of the Operating System/360 software suite: operating system, 16 compilers, communications, and utilities.

He founded the UNC Department of Computer Science in 1964 and chaired it for 20 years. His research there has been in computer architecture, software engineering, and interactive 3-D computer graphics (protein visualization graphics and "virtual reality"). His best-known books are The Mythical Man-Month (1975, 1995); Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution (with G.A. Blaauw, 1997); and The Design of Design (2010).

Dr. Brooks has received the National Medal of Technology, the A.M. Turing award of the ACM, the Bower Award and Prize of the Franklin Institute, the John von Neumann Medal of the IEEE, and others. He is a member of the U.S. National Academies of Engineering and of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Academy of Engineering (U.K.) and of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He became a Christian at age 31 and has taught an adult Sunday school class for 35 years. He chaired the Executive Committee for the 1973 Research Triangle Billy Graham Crusade. He and Mrs. Nancy Greenwood Brooks are faculty advisors to a graduate student chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. They have three children and nine grandchildren.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
105 global ratings

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Customers find the content insightful and well-written. They also appreciate the writing style.

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12 customers mention "Content"12 positive0 negative

Customers find the book's content insightful, well-grounded in experience, and superb.

"...His stance is earnest and authentic. His examples are relevant and essential...." Read more

"...The writing was good and the lessons were still valid. I thought of rating it 3 or 4 stars and decided to still go with a 4 star rating...." Read more

"...There are lots of practical guides on the Internet. The book is a collection of wisdom, most of which, however, you have probably heard before...." Read more

"...Well grounded in experience, not "here's-my-new-idea-that-hasn't-been-tried-at-scale".Experience counts. It's in this book." Read more

9 customers mention "Writing style"9 positive0 negative

Customers find the writing style well-written, insightful, and coherent. They also mention that the book provides a nice summary of the essence of design.

"...His writing is economical, elegant, accessible, and authoritative. His stance is earnest and authentic. His examples are relevant and essential...." Read more

"...Anyways, as mentioned, I still enjoyed reading it. The writing was good and the lessons were still valid...." Read more

"I found the book to be a relatively easy read. I may have missed some critical points...." Read more

"...Overall, Brook's writing style is excellent, entertaining and thoroughly researched so you will not be disappointed." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

Michael Tiemann
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for 21st century thinkers and doers
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2010
Verified Purchase
In 1989 I started a new kind of software company, and considering that I had no financial, business, nor management experience, things went fairly well. Indeed, we doubled revenue every year for the first five years and grew from 3 people to more than 60. Somewhere along the line we hit our first real management crisis, and I was given the assignment to read  The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)  as a first step in understanding why our scheduling and deliverables process had become so protracted and precarious.

It was an eye opener, and it gave me my first real understanding of the fundamental limits of the industrial model. (Michael Pollan's  The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals  was the second, and perhaps even more profound.) Thus, when I discovered that Brooks had written a new book to treat one of my favorite new topics--Design--I decided to order it right away. Then, while it was sitting in my shopping cart, I read through some of the comments, and though several of them spread doubt about the quality or validity of this latest effort, I decided that I would risk the purchase. And I am glad I did.

I recently gave a four star review to another book on the topic of design: Roger Martin's latest book  The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage . I felt bad about doing so because there is so much to like about that book and so much I appreciate about Martin's teachings. But the book did not strike me as one the best possible treatment of the subject, so I gave it only four stars. By that measure, I'm giving  The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist  a full five-star rating because I believe he has met that criteria. His writing is economical, elegant, accessible, and authoritative. His stance is earnest and authentic. His examples are relevant and essential. And his topic is absolutely vital to the proper construction of our 21st century economy.

This is a book I will have to buy in bulk, and to give to the many people I meet in my daily work who need the conceptual reboot that it provides. I recommend it to anyone who needs or produces creative work in these early days of the 21st century, whether in the public, private, or academic sectors.
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Bas Vodde
4.0 out of 5 stars Old-ish insights in a new book
Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2010
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I, as probably many others, was looking forward reading "the design of design." I had pre-ordered it as soon as I knew I could and read it soon after it arrived. Unfortunately, the book disappointed me somewhat. It is not that it doesn't have insights... it does! It is not that it is written badly... it isn't! It is that most of the insights and examples are similar or the same as the Mythical Man-Month. Next to that, Fred Brooks doesn't seem to have any newer experiences managing software projects than the OS360 project :( The book is still worth reading, but it definitively isn't as useful as the Mythical Man Month (which with every work of Fred Brooks will be compared).

The book contains six parts and is about 400 pages thick. The first part of the book called "Models of Designing" dives (again) in the Waterfall Model and explains that it doesn't work, cannot work, and has never ever worked. He compares the Waterfall model to the Rational Model of design (from Simon) which has been criticized as being overly simplistic. Brooks still spends about 50 pages diving in Waterfall model and concludes this with: "The waterfall model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it"

The second part is about collaboration and tele-collaboration. To me, this was the weakest part of the book. In this part, Brooks argues that a good design always comes from one designer and cannot be developed by a group or a team. This is contrary to my own experiences and also, according to his notes, contrary to some of the reviewers experiences. Yet he keeps stressing this point throughout his book. The subject of tele-collaboration was covered only minimally.

The third part is probably the best part of the book and names design perspectives. Each chapter is a separate essay about one aspect of design. I especially enjoyed chapter 13 where Brooks argues we'll need more examplars of good software developers we can build on. Good design is build on good examples, but in software development... good examples are rarely studied (even though they are nowadays frequently Open Sourced)

The fourth and most of the sixth part of the book were uninteresting to me. The fourth part discusses a design that Brooks made with his team to design a dream system for architects for designing houses. It was mainly a description of the design decisions he made. Chapter six consists of case studies. Most of these case studies are Brooks amateur (physical) architecture studies where he, in he free time, extended his house and build a beach house. The cases aren't strongly linked to the design perspectives and design model he described earlier and it made them rather uninteresting to me (a software developer first). Chapter six also has cases about the IBM 360 system and operating system. I was more interested in these chapters, especially from a historical perspective. (Brooks his beach house might be beautiful, it had no impact on the world other than Family Brooks' enjoyable life at the beach).

The fifth part is short and names Great Designers. It contains two chapter "Great Designs come from Great Designers" and "Where do Great Designers Come From?". I enjoyed these chapters as a reminder of the impact of people and talent on the result of a project. And the question, which is unfortunately not a common discussion, how to actually teach great design (which he then links back to the examplars).

Overall, I enjoyed reading The Design of Design, yet I expected more. I was particularly disappointed by the old-ness (and perhaps obsoleteness) of the examples. Nearly all examples came again from the IBM 360 project. As programming language examples with a good design, Brooks doesn't talk about Ruby or Haskell... no he mentions APL. There is no example about modern design (in software that is) or any suggestion that Fred Brooks has been involved in a software development project after the IBM 360 project. This did not make his writing less entertaining, nor his insights less insightful, yet... I had expected more. Oh, and the case studies about his amateur architecture projects could probably be skipped.

Anyways, as mentioned, I still enjoyed reading it. The writing was good and the lessons were still valid. I thought of rating it 3 or 4 stars and decided to still go with a 4 star rating. However, if you are unfamiliar with Fred Brooks work, I'd recommend to read "The Mythical Man Month" instead.
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Maxim Ko.
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books on design and thinking methodology
Reviewed in Canada on January 18, 2020
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As usual, Fred Brook provokes thought through interesting reasoning and anecdotes from various areas and industries.
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hector
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesante
Reviewed in Mexico on February 16, 2019
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Interesante aunque podría ser mejor. Es sencillo de leer.
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Duncan
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books, if not THE best book, on software design I have ever read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 28, 2017
Verified Purchase
I wish I had read this earlier. It is an amazing book and as a software engineer you owe it to yourself to read this. To much these days people say "the code is the documentation", but the code doesn't include all the roads-not-taken, and often when someone new comes to a piece of software they end up reinventing all the mistakes of their predecessors because of this lack of communication. This book should be compulsory reading for anyone who is allowed to touch software in our society. And I am deadly serious.

I'm off to read it again.
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D. Hawthorne
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent collection of essays
Reviewed in Australia on December 24, 2019
Verified Purchase
I found the book to be a relatively easy read. I may have missed some critical points.

What interested me was the idea of deliberating training oneself to be a great designer. This is a new concept. I have just fallen into design. There has been no conscious decision to do design. And then to actively study design.

Up to now, I have not designed any real database systems. I have designed small subsystems mainly to do with searching music titles, storing financial transactions for credit cards, etc. All really conceptually uninteresting, but very challenging in physical implementation. I was more of a carpenter rather than an architect.

Once one has made the decision to become a designer, Brooks suggests that one seek out the best in the field and study their designs. This is extremely difficult to do in the database field because all database designs are hidden away. I know of no published database designs. There are books on database designs but these are recipe books not a diary of what was done and why.

In studying design, Brooks says to concentrate on the constraints the designer worked under, and try to find out what was the conceptual vision they were working towards.

From database designs I have seen to date, not all of the design is in the database. By this, I mean that the rules about object behaviour is sometimes encoded in the application itself not in the constrints explicated in the data dictionary. Some constraints may even be in user behaviour.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Interessant, aber kein Augenöffner
Reviewed in Germany on August 28, 2010
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Brooks' Essaysammlung  The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering  ist zu Recht ein Klassiker der IT-Literatur und hat bis heute kaum an Gültigkeit verloren. Sein aktuelles Werk "The Design of Design" schließt da leider nicht an.

Das Buch ist eine Sammlung von lose zusammenhängenden Kapiteln, in denen Brooks Gedanken, Anekdoten und Beobachtungen aus seiner beruflichen und privaten Praxis erzählt. Vieles davon ist bekannt oder sogar banal, einiges ist interessant, kaum etwas aber wirklich neu und überraschend. Wie gewohnt schöpft er dabei aus dem offenbar unendlichen Repertoire an Geschichten über das System/360, aber auch aus seinen eigenen Abenteuern beim Hausbau. Beispiele aus aktuellen großen Software-Projekten sind kaum zu finden.

Am Ende bleibt das Gefühl, ein paar interessante Dinge gelesen zu haben, aber nicht mehr. Brooks muss man Respekt zollen für seine Bereitschaft zur gnadenlosen Selbstkritik, und tatsächlich sind die Beschreibungen seiner Fehler in Management und Design die lehrreichsten Teile des Buches. Auch die Bibliographie ist interessant und enthält einige Perlen zum Thema Architektur.

In eine Top-10-Leseliste für Designer und Architekten würde ich "The Design of Design" aber nicht wählen.
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