Shipman's reading list: software design

Software engineering has been my central pursuit since 1966. Here is a partial list of my favorite books in the field, in no particular order.

• Death march, Ed Yourdon.
• Peopleware, Tom de Marco and Timothy Lister.
• The mythical man-month, Frederick P. Brooks.
• Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi.
• The stress of life and Stress without distress by Hans Selye.
• The art of programming, Don Knuth.
• Object-oriented software construction, Bertrand Meyer.
• Design Patterns, Gamma et al.
• Toward zero-defect programming, Allan M. Stavely.
• Structured analysis and system specification, Tom de Marco.
• The psychology of computer programming by Gerald Weinberg. Some of it is dated, but much is golden and timeless.

There is more to successful software engineering than technique. The social aspects are critical too. See my pages on organizational behavior, especially the readings in human factors.

Last updated: 2001/10/05 00:52:56
URL: http://www.nmt.edu/~shipman/reading/software.html