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facundo

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Joined 10 months, 3 weeks ago

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David Farley: Modern Software Engineering (2022, Pearson Education, Limited) 4 stars

Review of 'Modern Software Engineering' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

The one useful contribution of this book is in its first two chapters, where the author states his intention to reclaim the "engineering" part of software engineering, compares it with science and craft and proposes that an engineering approach is possible and even necessary for software development.

The rest of the book was supposed to support those intentions but was a disappointment. Despite the title, the ideas presented here (modularity, abstraction, separation of concerns) aren't particularly modern; the techniques insisted upon (XP, TDD, continuous delivery, domain-driven design) are also 15-20 years old . This isn't a problem in itself, but the book doesn't present these techniques as effectively as their canonical sources (or Wikipedia, for that matter), is not a good summary of them and doesn't make a convincing argument about why they achieve the goals introduced at the beginning of the book. The content remains vague and anecdotal, and …