A Philosophy of Software program Design by John Ousterhout

I lately completed studying A Philosophy of Software program Design by John Ousterhout and I assumed 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 likely one of the greatest sellers in Amazon and it had a variety of good evaluations.

Concerning the creator #

The creator 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 concept of co-scheduling. John Ousterhout has completed some vital contributions to the sector of pc 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 pc science program at Stanford College. Regardless of the highly-academic background of the creator 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 model that may be adopted with simple 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. Nevertheless, I nonetheless loved this e-book as a result of I believe the creator has completed 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 creator dares to problem some frequent greatest practices similar to “features 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. Info hiding (and Leakage)
6. Basic-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 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 number of the concepts felt someway opinionated and probably not goal. Nevertheless, 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 creator. Additionally, he wouldn’t be capable of 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 through the first half of the e-book. Nevertheless, 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 attention-grabbing than I did.

I’d additionally like to say that this e-book is fairly low-cost. Many tech books have a worth mark of 40 to 60 USD and this books out there for 17.27 USD in its paperback version. Sadly, the e-book shouldn’t be out there 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 might have discovered this overview helpful. I’ve plans to attempt to overview all of the tech books that I learn from now personal. So please observe me if you wish to learn extra e-book evaluations sooner or later.