Principle of Program Development: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design

Author: Qiu Jian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: This book is written by a renowned expert in programming theory and serves as the textbook for the programming practice course at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It discusses how to construct software development methods that are highly reliable, easy to maintain, and can be modified quickly, emphasizing the modular development approach of software. With numerous examples, the book guides readers on how to modularize and reasonably organize various modules to form large-scale software systems. The first eight chapters of the book introduce some highly useful abstract concepts in the field of programming, such as process abstraction, iterative abstraction, and the most important—data abstraction. Additionally, the book uses extensive examples to define these data abstractions with informal specifications, describe the tasks modules need to accomplish, and define the performance boundary conditions required for modules. The last seven chapters focus on how to use abstraction to build large-scale software, emphasizing the content of software engineering. Based on type hierarchies, they propose debugging, testing, requirements analysis, top-down, and iterative development processes for data abstraction, and briefly introduce the concept of design patterns. This is a book that imparts insights, enabling readers to see beyond the surface and grasp the key principles of programming. It is highly suitable as a textbook for software academies, capable of cultivating the abstract thinking skills of lower-level students. Furthermore, it is also an excellent reference for software developers.