Rating: 
Summary: Worth the paper it's printed on but no more
Review: I used this book in a 400 level college course on software engineering, and found it to be exceedingly shallow in its coverage of the topic. The work is a worthy attempt at providing a broad overview of the discipline. However, in my estimate it covers too much material in too little space and presents too few practical examples of the type that might be applicable to a "real-world" software project. Further the text only gives lip service to the wide array of tools now available. In all honesty I don't see how any one could give this book more than three starts (apologies to the other reviewers), especially considering that the book is now in its sixth edition. I was at the used book store recently and had the good fortune of acquiring Stephen R. Schach's excellent book: "Software Engineering with Java." If you are a college professor looking for a course text, I would highly recommend taking a look at this book.
Rating:
Summary: a book without structure
Review: One expects one's textbooks to present material in a structured way. This book is all over the place. It is full of references to material "covered in the next section" or "I explain this later in the book". It is also full of incomplete sentences, spelling errors, and uncoordinated subjects and predicates. For failness' sake onó must admit that some useful information may be gleaned with some effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent text for an introduction to Software Engineering.
Review: Sommerville gives a keen view of the entire breath of this broad topic. His text is filled with easy to understand illustrations and chapter summaries. The examples are end-to-end because he provides the needed preliminaries (concepts and foundations) to understand the results. His treatment of requirements engineering and formal specification methods is quite good. In addition to the key points (of each chapter) he provides pointers to other resources on each subtopic. I find this text better for use in the classroom than the other leading text (which I use as a reference) because Sommerville's presentation provides a more logical flow and organization (i.e., its easier to read). I used the slides that are available (.ppt) from his web site to supplement my lectures.
Rating: 
Summary: Great text book
Review: Sommerville has updated his classic textbook. We are using it for part of a Master in Software Engineering program. While you won't get detail on any one topic, you will find a very current (java, UML, distributed arch) review of many SE topics. Supposedly a big improvement over the last version. Clear, good examples, and reccomended readings that get you to key articles in the literature. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that I reserve that for pure classics. It is hard to get a textbook into that category.
Rating:
Summary: Informative but not Practical
Review: This book is an encyclopedic volume of knowledge about Software Engineering, and proceeds from the beginning of the process to the end, with tangents being in the last few chapters. It has the feel of a textbook, with exercises and Key Points at the end of each chapter. That said, it isn't very entertaining and if it hadn't been my course book, I would have chosen a different Software Engineering text. This book is a great supplemental reference to get more detailed information. I keep it on my shelf at work as a handy reference.
Rating: 
Summary: most definitely a textbook
Review: This book is an encyclopedic volume of knowledge about Software Engineering, and proceeds from the beginning of the process to the end, with tangents being in the last few chapters. It has the feel of a textbook, with exercises and Key Points at the end of each chapter. That said, it isn't very entertaining and if it hadn't been my course book, I would have chosen a different Software Engineering text. This book is a great supplemental reference to get more detailed information. I keep it on my shelf at work as a handy reference.
Rating:
Summary: Shallow and not using American English
Review: This book tries to cover way too much information in such a small space leaving topics overly vague and generic. Further, the author does not use American English, which is fine - when you don't attend an American university. Words such a "modelling" and general sentence structure makes the text distracting and confusing in ways it shouldn't be. If I am going to have trouble reading it, let it be the material and now how the material is presented. If the book isn't forced upon you by a university, you should consider a different software engineering book if you want details. Of course, I won't even go into my professor who is using this book - yikes.
Rating: 
Summary: A Horrible Book with Lots of Terminologies
Review: This is a horrible book with lots of un-popular terminologies and using abbreviated words, I believe that we can live with "it is likely to" instead of "it is prone that". Furthermore, lack of descriptive volcabulary, eg, "inevitably" had been used more than 10 times in just one single chapter, and countlessly in total.
Rating:
Summary: Good introduction and depth for novice
Review: While reading the contents list of the book, you already start feeling a software engineer. The author explains every important step of software engineering as promised in the contents list. All kind of specification posibilities, design systems, reliability and verification approaches are topics that opened my eyes. On the other hand, the part of object-oriented only told about OO as a modeling approach and hardly surpassed the level of buzzword. Perhaps some more attention in a next version? Still, the book is perfect for the novice at the topic of software engineering.(2000-06-29)
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