Re: software engineering

[carlos pehoe civil ist utl pt (Carlos Pereira)]

Jim, Peter, Dave,

Thanks a lot for your answers, I will look 
carefully at the resources that you suggested
(some books I know, others are totally unknown 
to me, perhaps I will buy some of them).

Having said that, I must add that it just puzzles
me that in the entire world wide web there is not
a single free forum/list exclusively dedicated to 
discuss code quality and ways to improve it.

Because a book is different from a mailling list, that's 
why we are all in this list, right? otherwise we would 
be just re-reading Havoc's and the other Gtk books around
for the fourth time...

And please note that I am talking about real code, not
just blah, blah schematic, generic discussions, as is 
unfortunately the case in many software engineering
books.

Some of this stuff is useful essentially for advanced
development (what are the advantages/disadvantages of 
using recursive makefiles over including makefiles,
when code is spread over many directories, with several
levels of sub-directories, shall these makefiles be all 
included in a single large makefile or use a cascade-style 
including in sucessive layers?)

Other issues are useful even for newbies (what is the
best compromise for the maximum number of columns in a 
programming line? very old Fortran compilers would ignore 
everything above 80 columns, in modern languages as Python
this is a very critical issue, because wrapping long lines
would change completely the code meaning, so long lines
tend to be cut after some column limit, when printing)

I think I could come up with literally hundreds of topics
for discussion, and I really think that the free software
community should have lists to discuss these important issues.
If we discuss these topics and share our insights on the best 
development practises, taken from our own experiences, the best 
advices would be more widely adopted, thus improving code quality 
and making it more easy to maintain these projects (an issue that 
is particularly critical in free software projects: how much effort 
new developers need to put to start writing useful code/docs for 
the project? many people just give up because the entering barrier 
is too high).

Carlos
http://www.gamgi.org/

> Might try the Software Engineering Institute at Carnagie-Melon
> University.  When I was in school they were doing alot of work with the
> Govt. about process control, etc.  Not much was mentioned about Open
> Source, but this was  a while back.
>
> try:  http://www.sei.cmu.edu/
>
> cheers,
> Jim Parker

> This is my reading list:
>   Rapid Development by Steve McConnell
>   The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks
>   The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald M. Weinberg
>   Peopleware by Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
>
> The first one is the most practical of the four - it also has the best
> bibliography.
>
> -Peter

> Books I've found readable and practical:

> Code Complete by Steve McConnell
> Refactoring by Martin Fowler
> Design Patterns Explained by Allan Shalloway and James Trott
> The Pragmatic Programmer
> Smalltalk, Design and Patterns by Chamond Liu

> The last is a good introduction to OO even if you never intend to use
> Smalltalk.

> Dave Cook