Software Engineering

This book was a required text for a graduate course in Software Engineering that I had taken. We covered about 2/3rd's of the text in class. The authors have done a pretty good job of presenting various concepts and I liked this book for the most part. In some places, the diagrams presented are very confusing (especially in design related chapters such as chapter 6 Considering Objects) since the notation used deviates from the standard UML. While I had to do a class project for the course that included design and implementation, I supplemented this book with Applying UML and Patterns by Craig Larman, which does an excellent job in presentation of UML for software design. I will recommend this book to novices to intermediate level readers in this arena. Note that this book does not cover concurrency (but only stand alone applications), so our professor used another book - Concurrency State Models and Java Programs by Jeff Magee and Jeff Kramer - for this purpose. These two books together will give an interested reader a pretty good introduction to the software engineering field.

I had to purchase this book as a required textbook for a Software Engineering course. Not only was I pleased material and the way it was presented, but I have used it numerous times as a reference book for my other software related courses. If it is on your required reading list, don't fret at the price tag like I did, pick up the book, it's a good read and worth the cash!