Schaum's Outline of Software Engineering

My background was in QA and regulatory management in manufacturing industries when I joined a software firm to develop formal documentation, testing, training, and internal audit processes. This book fast tracked my learning the basics of software engineering to enable me to accomplish the mission. Money well spent.

I purchased this as a required book for a graduate course I took (CS 5704 at Virginia Tech). It is an excellent roadmap for a broad scope of software engineering topics. But you should expect to treat it as a directory of topics from which you must branch out for more in-depth treatment and experience of the topics.The book is generally well written. Is is very readable and clear, though I do have some complaints. Many topics presuppose other knowledge referenced nowhere else in the book. For example, Chapter 5 on Software Metrics includes a short section on Statistics, which refer to Spearman correlations and Pearson correlations, with no clue as to what they are.One area in particular, Software Project Management, is 16 pages in its entirety. I have been a software development manager since 1988 and it is almost criminal to lead anyone to believe that what they need to know about this topic in 16 pages. The material there is quite good, and I learned something new myself, but the brevity could be quite misleading to a naive student.Many chapters in this book are deserving of having one (or more) college courses dedicated to the subject. Software Design alone, a single chapter here, takes years to master the concepts described.However, this book is marketed as an outline, and a very good outline it is.

I bought this book because of the high ratings (and corresponding low ratings of Sommerville's and Pressman's Software Engineering texts). I have to say that I was highly disappointed with this book. Just get Sommerville's or Pressman's textbook and skip this sub-par outline. I have Pressman's textbook and you can learn far more about software engineering from skimming that one than from reading this one.

Overall one will get an idea about the threads one have to explore in software engineering. This can be viewed as knowing keywords of software engineering. One need other books for details. Just if one want to get feel about what constitute the software engineering. This can be served for this purpose.

Great product, no problems with it so far!

Acostumbrado a otros libros de textos, llenos de ejemplos de cómo no funcionan las cosas, o al contrario de ejemplos que confirman las bondades de las teorías expuestas, éste se reduce a la esencia mínima.Se describe el concepto y se ponen ejemplos (sencillos en la mayor parte de los casos), nada más y nada menos. Cierto que muchas veces el tópico es ciertamente complicado de entender o la literatura es muy amplia, pero si en lo único que estás interesado es en conocer la idea básica tras el concepto, este libro es el adecuado. Mayoritariamente, con aplicar básicamente lo que aquí se describe uno tiene más que sifuciente para abordar la mayoría de los proyectos de seguimiento de software. Todavía no he visto ninguna organización (y ya he estado en varias y con proyectos de gran envergadura) que incluya métricas de seguimiento, como las básicas que aquí se describen (control estadístico) o incluso un simple análisis PostMortem del proyecto.Quedan para otros libros más detallados, pero también menos asequibles, el entender el "por qué" de lo que en este se cuenta.Carlos Ortega2006-01-30

This Schaum's outline does a great job of outlining the vast majority of topics you must study in order to call yourself a software engineer versus a programmer. As other reviewers have pointed out, it is not a comprehensive textbook on the subject but makes a great "big picture" supplement. This is particularly valuable to students since college software engineering classes are often poorly structured and taught. When I took software engineering at Virginia Tech the professor actually believed that learning software engineering involved memorizing every UNIX command and all of its options. Thus guidance in this discipline is at a premium.This book's format is to mention all of the major subtopics of software engineering, provide a paragraph or two in description, and then provide some examples as well as exercises for the student. No particular programming language is used since this is not a book about programming, rather it is about the tools and metrics used to organize, manage, measure, and test programming projects. Everything from project management to metrics to object-oriented design techniques is at least mentioned.Although there is no formal bibliography given, throughout the book there are references to the work of authors and experts in the field who have written more extensive works on particular aspects of software engineering such as Glenford Myers who authored the classic "The Art of Software Testing", Watts Humphrey author of "Introduction to the Personal Software Process", and Tom DeMarco who penned "Controlling Software Projects". I highly recommend this outline to students of software engineering and also to professionals who might need a quick reference for certain aspects of the field that they may have forgotten.

This is a good basic outline of Software Engineering. It accurately covers many areas, but not in depth. This is what I expected from this outline and it delivered. It will get you started in the right direction.