Principles of Program Design

by Michael A. Jackson

The original program design text, this book is about programming for data processing applications, and it presents a coherent method and procedure for designing systems, programs, and components that are transparently simple and self evidently correct. The main emphasis is on the structure--on the dissection of a problem into parts and the arrangement of those parts to form a solution. Exercises and questions for discussion are given at the end of almost every chapter.

Genres: Programming

310 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Professor Michael Anthony Jackson (born 1936) works as an independent computing consultant in London, England, and also as a part-time researcher at AT&T Research, Florham Park, NJ, U.S.. He is a visiting research professor at the Open University in the UK.

Jackson was educated at Harrow School where he was taught by Christopher Strachey and wrote his first program under Strachey's guidance. He then studied classics at Oxford University (known as "Greats"), where he was a fellow student with C. A. R. Hoare, two years ahead of him. They had a shared interest in logic, which was studied as part of Greats at Oxford.

In the 1970s, Jackson developed Jackson Structured Programming (JSP). In the 1980s, with John Cameron, he developed Jackson System Development (JSD). Then, in the 1990s, he developed the Problem Frames Approach. In collaboration with Pamela Zave, he created Distributed Feature Composition, a virtual architecture for specification and implementation of telecommunication services.