| | |  | Databases | Home » » Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach | | | | | | | Description: | | For almost three decades, Roger Pressman's Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach has been the world's leading textbook in software engineering. The new seventh edition represents a major restructuring and update of previous editions, solidifying the book's position as the most comprehensive guide to this important subject.The seventh edition of Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach has been designed to consolidate and restructure the content introduced over the past two editions of the book. The chapter structure will return to a more linear presentation of software engineering topics with a direct emphasis on the major activities that are part of a generic software process. Content will focus on widely used software engineering methods and will de-emphasize or completely eliminate discussion of secondary methods, tools and techniques. The intent is to provide a more targeted, prescriptive, and focused approach, while attempting to maintain SEPA's reputation as a comprehensive guide to software engineering. The book will be organized in five (5) parts-Process, Modeling, Quality Management, Project Management, and Advanced Topics. The chapter count will remain at 32, unchanged from the sixth edition. However, eight new chapters have been developed and another six chapters have undergone major or moderate revisions. The remaining chapters have undergone minor edits/updates. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Roger Pressman | | Hardcover:
| 928 pages | | Publisher:
| McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math | | Publication Date:
| January 20, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0073375977 | | Package Length:
| 9.2 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.6 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.6 inches | | Package Weight:
| 3.25 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 4 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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UnbearableSep 08, 2010
This book is unreadable. I'm just three chapters in, and I can't bear the thought of having to read more. Nearly every paragraph is inflated with buzzwords, obscure new phases and acronyms. The author drones on and on about archaic software models when a simple table and summary of each would suffice. Pressman writes almost as if he is trying to fill a word quota.
Before reading this book, I believed software engineering was dead. And after reading some of this book, I now know why: Software Engineering == Software Bureaucracy.
Potential buyers of this book might want to read the article "Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?" by Tom DeMarco.
Waste of moneyJul 05, 2010
This book was purchased as a required text for a master's level class, and I am highly disappointed in it.
The book broadly and superficially covers all software engineering concepts, and to the untrained reader might appear to be a comprehensive text. Just don't look too closely. If you know absolutely nothing about the software engineering process, and want to have a high level grasp of the uniqueness that is software, then this book could be of use. The descriptions do a good job of introducing SE concepts and theories, although some are dated.
If you are tasked with developing a software engineering strategy, or running a software-intensive project, or are looking to build a solid foundation and understanding of the software engineering process, walk away. Just walk away. This book introduces new terms, redefining widely and commonly used words for the software development life cycle and others. The entire SE body of knowledge uses certain words that students and practitioners get used to, and this author seems to change them around just to be different. Furthermore, the author interchanges these terms around, and is not consistent when referring to the same concept. Not something I'd expect to see after 7 revisions.
3 of 7 found the following review helpful:
Sucks BallsFeb 04, 2010
To be fair, I haven't read most of the book, and have only been using it for about three weeks in a course I'm taking. But so far, the book seems to just be about buzzwords and trends that are sure to pass with time. It reminds me of a management class I took two years ago, but in that class, the instructor even acknowledged that most of the things covered were just buzzwords and fads. I thought this class was going to be about design patterns and various best practices, but instead I'm force fed all this management and organization mumbo-jumbo. This book is also filled with a crap-load of idealized graphs and diagrams that aren't based on any real data. That kind of stuff always annoys me.
While I think it may be worthwhile to briefly cover these methodologies to get some ideas, actually following a methodology "to-a-T" seems like a bad idea, and could possibly cripple innovation and creativity. Most of the premises behind the ideas seem to be common sense any way. Of course a business should monitor its performance, try to constantly improve it's processes, efficiently allocate resources, etc... I don't need a book full of pre-packaged methodologies to tell me that.
Also, I haven't yet entered the "real-world" yet, so I may have no idea what I'm talking about. But I would probably hate working for a company that strictly followed most of the methodologies presented in this book.
14 of 17 found the following review helpful:
Horrible out of date Software Engineering bookDec 12, 2009
This book is like a bloated piece of software. The author wastes so much of the book describing outdated methods and does not even seem to understand current methods. For example, many of the chapters describe procedural programming techniques such as data flow diagrams and then give a brief inaccurate description of modern techniques such as UML. The author also makes a big deal about comparing "traditional" programming and object oriented. Given that object oriented has been the dominant style for about 20 years, it just seems irrelevant to discuss it so much in the book. The examples in the book are also very confusing and hard to relate to. Instead of picking something simple that everybody knows like a banking system, he often uses something like a convoluted sensor system. This is just a horrible book and it's unfortunate that many CS students have to get stuck using it.
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