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Summary: Bird's Eye View
Review: The sixth edition is better organised that earlier editions. Its coverage is broad though not deep. For example the chapter on Agile methods gives a brief description of the different flavours, including their strengths and weaknesses and summarises what Agile methods have in common. It is targeted at a manager/team leader whose responsibilities do not normally include cutting code. Also it is geared towards enterprise architecture as the `Safe Home' running example amply demonstrates. So if you are writing parsers or numerical applications this is not meant for you.
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Summary: Tt's the best book,especially in having some problems!
Review: The software engineering is ignored in many companies in China. The quality of softwares is poor. I believe the software engineering should be used in the develpment of software in China.
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Summary: Overall recommended
Review: The software information is common sense and valuable. As an added bonus it is full of helpful hints on dealing with a world where everyone is stupid except for the software engineer.
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Summary: Not a good book about se in my option
Review: These book covers almost everything about se, but everything in its superficialness. It's just a hybird of too many viewpoints.It's better used as a reference book if you are a new comer or not familar with some se concept.
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Summary: Outdated and verbose
Review: This book is ancient. In this day and age of Object Oriented Analysis and Design this type of book should be put on display in a museum. This book may be good for someone who is still using fortran, cobol, or pascal. However, it will set your development efforts back 10 years if you are trying to write extensible, supportable, useful code with minimum bugs. The author spends way too much time quoting TLAs from academic wonks that worked on the first electric circuit. A great cure for insomnia. Not recommended for people with suicidal tendencies.
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Summary: 911 of software engineering
Review: This book is must for all those who really are interested in software engineering. Information is precise and is explained with the help of diagrams and examples wherever necessary. The book is no fun to read it is strictly for people who are serious in software engineering. Book is best not only for introducing software engineering but also for reference purpose. At least, I can't live with out the guidelines given in it. I am thankful to my teacher who told me about this book. Buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Strongly not recommended
Review: This book never talks about teamwork, which is the core of any software engineering. It talks about testing in the one of the last chapters and then it contradicts itself by recommending early software testing. Finally it is not written for undergraduate student but rather for someone with a PHD.
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Summary: complete reference for software staff.
Review: This book provide so many useful topic for software staff, project, manager, designer, programmer, test... It is very good indeed.
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Summary: Half empty or half full?
Review: This book teachs you how to write hundreds of pages of documentation before writing even a single line of code.
If you work for the government or a bureaucratic large company, you may get a promotion for the documentation. If you work for an effeciency oriented small company, you will get fired.
My prediction is: any company that fully implements the author's method of project management will lose in competition and have to lay off half of its programers within 5 years. This was what happened to IBM 5 years ago and may soon happen to Motorola.
As a consultant, the author knows very well how to make a simple problem very difficult to be understood: unnecessary classifications, unnecessary introduction of not well defined abstract new terminologies and so on.
Just look at a couple of examples:
A control is in fact just a binary (true of false) data. Seperating it from other data doubles the pages. A data transaction differs very little from a data transform, but seperating them doubles the pages again.
A good point is: if you don't know how to communicate to your customer, the author teachs you how:
You may send him a short memo, or a report, or a request, or a documentation, ...
You may have an informal chat with him, or you may have a formal meeting with him, ...
You may send him an e-mail, or you may fax him, or you may have a video-conference with him, or you may simply give him a phone call, ...
(you may leave him a message in case he's not in, this is all I can think of to append to the author's list.)
All these methods are well categorized in the book. Hope all readers can benifit from the instruction.
Xiaolong Wu
Loyola Univ. (Chicago)
Rating:
Summary: A MUST AVOID for any professional or instructor.
Review: This is one of the poorest textbooks I have ever encountered. A MUST AVOID for any professional or instructor. The content is very broad, boring, outdated and incredibly irrelevant. If your instructor is using this book you should drop the class immediately. No professional would, in their right mind, rely on this text for a class. The price to content ratio is out of this world. High Cost / 0 content.
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