Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach 8th Edition

I rented the 7th edition for fall 2013. I thought it was a good book at the time even though there were some concepts that didn't seem applicable anymore. So far from reading the 8th edition, through chapter 4, I'm very excited to continue reading the updated material for this class I'm about to start fall 2014. I'm particularly interested in the new organization including mobile application development.

I want to buy the latest version... I love this book; it's a great reference. I repaired to it for multiple software engineering related courses. It's not perfect, but it's a spring board to understanding a lot of principles and methodologies used today, and if you can appreciate it's value, you'll be a better team player and developer for it.

Required for a course I am taking. Well written and easy to follow. Some topics could use a bit more depth but most are very detailed. This is a survey level textbook in practice. The authors long experience as a lecturer and educator makes this book a very strong resource.

This is one of the best books for learning the software development cycle.

It's a great book, expensive, but the product is great, not a book for casual learning, but an investment for Software Engineers.

Very good and practical

This is a terrible book which makes the implicit claim that software engineering is a much more organized discipline than it actually is, and most likely than it ever can be. I originally gave it one star, but bumped it to two, simply because I'm not sure there is a better book available. Yet, this doesn't make the problem go away.Software engineering, to put it in computer science terms, is carried out in the world of natural language rather than formal language. There are limits to the precision of the meaning of words, and limits to the precision with which formal processes can define human interactions. This would not be a problem if the book accepted these limits, but it attempts to push well beyond them. Pretending to say more than we can say about something results in saying less than we could have said if we hadn't pretended. The book follows the approach of defining words in terms of other words which are themselves badly defined, or promised to be defined later (a promise which is rarely kept), or are self-referential (architecture is architectural). And then, maybe, another model will be introduced which defines the same words differently (demonstrating the words don't really have a particular meaning) or uses different words for the same things, so that terms don't even have consistent meaning across a chapter. Then, these terms are used to discuss processes as if they've been rigorously defined, when they really haven't been. This leaves us pretending to have an engineering discussion with the precision of equations when we are having at best a social discussion with much less precision than that. If you enjoy reading well-built arguments you will constantly find jarring transitions in this book, along the lines of "it follows that," when quite simply, it does NOT follow.And then this is made worse by the fact that this is a modern textbook, with a modern test bank, in which it's assumed that the *correct* answer depends on the exact keywords the author used on page 391, despite the fact that even the author would certainly admit that this is just one way of looking at the thing.As I already said, there might not be a better effort available, but that doesn't mean this book isn't bad. In fact, it's bad enough that taking the class associated with this book made me want to quit studying computer science or even leave college. I won't do that, because the cost of doing so is too great in terms of what I need to accomplish for other reasons, but I view reading this book almost entirely as a cost to be borne in the service of a greater good. Someone, for Gods's sake, please write a better one.

Was in Great condition.