Designing Hard Software

Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource for those involved with software design
Review: This book is a great "tool kit" for all parties involved in software development. It gives equal time to current methodogies, and offers suggestions for how to create blueprints others can read for application systems, in the same way architects and engineers design a home. Makes complete sense. Great information with rationale behind it.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for software architecture
Review: This is a great book. I refer to it often and have used many of the ideas in it to build software. It is especially good at addressing software architectural issues which are seldom talked about in a coherant manner. The book takes an approach that is more apt to be of benefit to the desktop application designer. Although, being an embedded firmware designer, I found it to be very helpful anyway.

Some of the complaints that I have about it is that sometimes you have to hunt for the information you're looking for. It could have been organized a little better and the index certainly needs to be beefed-up. It could also use more treatment on how to do architectural design with operating system services such as tasks, threads, etc... in mind. Sometimes, the author uses several terms for the same concept which forces the reader to go back and say "oh...he meant such-and-such..." But these items are a small price to pay for the overall amount and depth of information covered.

A great book. Definitely on my top ten list!