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Structured Design: Fundamentals of a Discipline of Computer Program and Systems Design
A valuable new approach to computer systems and program design, structured design is quickly becoming the standard industrial technique for significantly improving productivity, enhancing reliability, and lowering maintenance costs.
473 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 27, 2020
Oft recommended as a seminal text this book is perhaps a bit dated for readers in the second decade of the 21st century.
The underlying ideas are powerful, the description of cohesion and coupling for example are insightful and clear, however being 45 years old at this point the linguistic tools the authors had to work with limit their expression.
The reliance on flowcharts and box diagrams feel antiquated compared to modern languages where packages and even indentation are taken for granted. The languages used for example, FORTRAN and cobol, limit the express ability of the examples. It was also numerous to read arguments in favour of passing arguments to subroutines as parameters rather than writing them to tape because of the conceptual overhead of function arguments.
Even so, with the limited tools available, the authors described, decades before DDD became en vogue, ideas like hexagonal design and bounded contexts.
A valuable text if, like me, you enjoy exposure to the corpus of early software engineering, but probably not applicable as a teaching aide for contemporary programmers
The underlying ideas are powerful, the description of cohesion and coupling for example are insightful and clear, however being 45 years old at this point the linguistic tools the authors had to work with limit their expression.
The reliance on flowcharts and box diagrams feel antiquated compared to modern languages where packages and even indentation are taken for granted. The languages used for example, FORTRAN and cobol, limit the express ability of the examples. It was also numerous to read arguments in favour of passing arguments to subroutines as parameters rather than writing them to tape because of the conceptual overhead of function arguments.
Even so, with the limited tools available, the authors described, decades before DDD became en vogue, ideas like hexagonal design and bounded contexts.
A valuable text if, like me, you enjoy exposure to the corpus of early software engineering, but probably not applicable as a teaching aide for contemporary programmers
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 30, 2022
I'm amazed that this book isn't more 'well known'. Of contains foundational insights about modularisation, cohesion, coupling, and many more important things to know when building software.
June 18, 2008
The standard text. Don't buy it new.
November 11, 2012
This is a seminal work in Software Engineering. While many havebuilt on (mostly) Constantine's work, this remains foundational work.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews