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 could be helpful to share my opinion about it with the group.

My motivation for selecting up this e-book was that I noticed that it is without doubt one of the finest sellers in Amazon and it had quite a lot of good opinions.

Concerning the writer #

The writer of the e-book is John Ousterhout. He’s a professor of laptop science at Stanford College. He was a professor of laptop 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 vital contributions to the sector of laptop science and has been awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award and an ACM Software program System Award.

Concerning the contents #

This e-book was written by John Ousterhout for use as the primary studying materials of one of many topics within the laptop 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 fashion that may be adopted with straightforward by non-academics and newbie laptop science college students.

I’m an skilled developer and I’ve heard about most of the concepts within the e-book earlier than. Nonetheless, I nonetheless loved this e-book as a result of I believe 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 finest practices reminiscent of “capabilities ought to be small” or “courses 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. Data hiding (and Leakage)
6. Normal-purpose modules are deeper
7. Completely different layers, totally 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 tendencies
19. Designing for efficiency
20. Conclusion

I actually loved the primary half of the e-book. The primary chapters talk about 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 a listing of purple flags that we must always keep away from. I disliked that among the concepts felt by some means opinionated and not likely goal. Nonetheless, I didn’t have an enormous downside with it as a result of I truly agree with a lot of the factors of view of the writer. Additionally, he wouldn’t be capable of problem some frequent finest 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 in the course of the first half of the e-book. Nonetheless, that is most likely my case as a result of I’ve learn different books (e.g. Clear Code) on comparable matters.

I’d suggest 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 fascinating 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 out there for 17.27 USD in its paperback version. Sadly, the e-book isn’t out there in digital codecs.

If you happen to suppose that you’d take pleasure in this e-book, it is possible for you to to buy it on-line at Amazon UK or Amazon US.

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