Software Visualization

Rating:
Summary: broad, hit-and-miss survey of the subject
Review: Most programmers ask themselves, "Why aren't my tools this easy to use?" According to the contributors to this book, the answer is that we make far too little use of interactive 2D and 3D graphics. Even the most advanced integrated-development environments (IDEs) are built around a text editor. If you compare this to the dozens of sketches that programmers draw to show data structures, inheritance, and control flow, you can see how much more we could be doing. Most of the systems discussed in Software Visualization use visualization to examine or explain existing programs. Some of the results leave me cold, but some, like the classic "Sorting Out Sorting" by Baecker et al., are truly illuminating.

Rating:
Summary: broad, hit-and-miss survey of the subject
Review: Most programmers ask themselves, "Why aren't my tools this easy to use?" According to the contributors to this book, the answer is that we make far too little use of interactive 2D and 3D graphics. Even the most advanced integrated-development environments (IDEs) are built around a text editor. If you compare this to the dozens of sketches that programmers draw to show data structures, inheritance, and control flow, you can see how much more we could be doing. Most of the systems discussed in Software Visualization use visualization to examine or explain existing programs. Some of the results leave me cold, but some, like the classic "Sorting Out Sorting" by Baecker et al., are truly illuminating.