A Philosophy of Software program Design by John Ousterhout

I lately completed studying A Philosophy of Software program Design by John Ousterhout and I believed that it will be helpful to share my opinion about it with the group.

My motivation for choosing up this e-book was that I noticed that it is without doubt one of the greatest sellers in Amazon and it had lots of good evaluations.

In regards to the writer #

The writer of the e-book is John Ousterhout. He’s a professor of pc science at Stanford College. He was a professor of pc science on the College of California, Berkeley the place he created the Tcl scripting language and the Tk platform-independent widget toolkit and proposed the thought of co-scheduling. John Ousterhout has finished some important contributions to the sphere of pc science and has been awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award and an ACM Software program System Award.

In regards to the contents #

This e-book was written by John Ousterhout for use as the primary studying materials of one of many topics within the pc science program at Stanford College. Regardless of the highly-academic background of the writer and being a part of the content material of the pc science program at Stanford College, the e-book is written in a really colloquial type that may be adopted with straightforward by non-academics and newbie pc science college students.

I’m an skilled developer and I’ve heard about lots of the concepts within the e-book earlier than. Nonetheless, I nonetheless loved this e-book as a result of I feel the writer has finished an excellent job extracting the essence of some ideas and placing it down in phrases. I notably loved the sections about complexity, interfaces, and abstractions.

I additionally loved that the writer dares to problem some frequent greatest practices reminiscent of “features ought to be small” or “lessons ought to solely do one factor” as a result of it encourages experimentation and being open-minded.

The e-book is split into the next 21 chapters:

1. Introduction
2. The character of complexity
3. Working code isn’t sufficient
4. Modules ought to be deep
5. Info hiding (and Leakage)
6. Basic-purpose modules are deeper
7. Completely different layers, completely different abstractions
8. Pull complexity downwards
9. Higher collectively or higher aside?
   10 Outline errors out of existence
10. Design it twice
11. Why write feedback? The 4 excuses
12. Feedback ought to describe issues that aren’t apparent from the code
13. Selecting names
14. Write feedback first
15. Modifying current code
16. Consistency
17. Code ought to be apparent
18. Software program traits
19. Designing for efficiency
20. Conclusion

I actually loved the primary half of the e-book. The primary chapters focus on the character and the primary causes of complexity in software program. The next chapters discover some frequent design issues in modules, interfaces, abstractions, coupling, and error dealing with. The e-book highlights the primary issues as an inventory of crimson flags that we should always keep away from. I disliked that a few of the concepts felt in some way opinionated and probably not goal. Nonetheless, I didn’t have an enormous drawback with it as a result of I truly agree with many of the factors of view of the writer. Additionally, he wouldn’t have the ability to problem some frequent greatest practices with out being opinionated.

After chapter 11 the content material was much less interesting to me as a result of I felt that I wasn’t studying as a lot as I used to be studying throughout the first half of the e-book. Nonetheless, that is in all probability my case as a result of I’ve learn different books (e.g. Clear Code) on related subjects.

I’d advocate the e-book for each senior and junior builders as a result of I actually loved the primary half of the e-book and I assume that some much less skilled builders will discover the second half of the e-book extra attention-grabbing than I did.

I’d additionally like to say that this e-book in all fairness low-cost. Many tech books have a value mark of 40 to 60 USD and this books accessible for 17.27 USD in its paperback version. Sadly, the e-book is just not accessible in digital codecs.

For those who suppose that you’d get pleasure from this e-book, it is possible for you to to buy it on-line at Amazon UK or Amazon US.

I hope you’ve got discovered this overview helpful. I’ve plans to attempt to overview all of the tech books that I learn from now personal. So please comply with me if you wish to learn extra e-book evaluations sooner or later.