Reuse-Based Software Engineering: Techniques, Organizations, and Controls

Rating:
Summary: Excellect
Review: "Reuse Based Software Engineering" is the best software reuse book that I have found. The coverage is exhaustive. The book is over 600 pages with 600 words per page - almost half a million words to reuse. The logical organization is detailed and facilitates domain modeling - the hierarchy goes to 3 levels in most places and has at the top level these sections:

* Introduction
* Organizational Aspects
* Domain Engineering: Building for Reuse
* Object-Oriented Domain Engineering
* Application Engineering
* Managerial Aspects of Software Reuse
* Software Reuse Technologies

No other book has such a comprehensive coverage of both the technical and managerial issues. More work has been done in the past on the technical issues, and this book faithfully represents that emphasis. The section on Object-Oriented Domain Engineering is 230 pages long and includes many examples of code that would facilitate object-oriented reuse.

The four authors are top international experts on software reuse. The book cites about 500 publications from the software reuse literature. In addition to covering all the major results of the past quarter century, the authors introduce some of their state of the art work. If you are seriously interested in software reuse, this book belongs in your collection.

Rating:
Summary: The definitive book on reuse
Review: Software engineering books are usually the most boring books you can find: you read them only if you have to. The reason is not because the subject is boring (it really is not), but because most of the software engineering researchers lack either knowledge, first hand experience, culture, intelligence, or combinations thereof.
This one is an exception. It if the first time I read a book on software engineering with the impression that I learn important things, that the authors know what they are talking about, and do no try to sell propaganda, but to understand the real issues behind reuse.
Taking reuse as a focal point, the book addresses and highlights most of the software engineering issues at stake in the last 20 years, from frameworks, patterns, oo programming up to metaclass programming and meta modeling. This makes it incidentally an ideal reference book for teaching software engineering in the large.
Not only you get plenty of technical details and well crafted examples, but you also get a fully documented vision - so often lacking in this field : that the whole point of engineering software is not only about solving problems, but also about solving them in the right way, elegantly, and so that the code produced is understandable, maintanable, etc. In short, that it makes sense.