Rise & Resurrection of The American Programmer

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Yourdon Press [Prentice-Hall, Inc.], 1996. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xv, [1], 318, [4] pages. Footnotes. Illustrations. References. Appendix. Index. This is one of the Yourdon Press Computing Series. A comprehensive profile of software landscape [when published], features insightful chapters on such areas as Microsoft, the Internet, the future of embedded systems, and the role of client/server. Edward Nash Yourdon (April 30, 1944 - January 20, 2016) was an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and software engineering methodology pioneer. He was one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s and a co-developer of both the Yourdon/Whitehead method for object-oriented analysis/design in the late 1980s and the Coad/Yourdon methodology for object-oriented analysis/design in the 1990s. In June 1997, Yourdon was inducted into the Computer Hall of Fame, along with such notables as Charles Babbage, James Martin, Grace Hopper, and Gerald Weinberg. In December 1999 Crosstalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering named him one of the ten most influential people in the software field. In the 1980s Yourdon developed the Yourdon structured method (YSM) in SSADM based on the functional structuring. The method supports two distinct design phases: analysis and design. YSM includes three discrete steps: the feasibility study; essential modeling; and implementation modeling. During the late 1990s, he was one of the proponents of the theory that the 'Y2K bug' could lead to a collapse of civilization, or at least protracted economic depression and technological breakdown on a wide scale. Decline and Fall of the American Programmer was addressed to American programmers and software organizations of the 1990s, warning that they were about to be driven out of business by programmers in other countries who could produce software more cheaply and with higher quality. The Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer was an update and more optimistic view. In the earlier work, Yourdon claimed that American software organizations could only retain their edge by using technologies such as ones he described in his book. Yourdon gave examples of how non-American—specifically Indian and Japanese—companies were making use of these technologies to produce high-quality software. In this new work, the chapter outline of the book is 1. The Original Premise, 2. Peopleware, 3. The Other Silver Bullets, 4. System Dynamics, 5. Personal Software Practices, 6. Best Practices, 7. Good-Enough Software, 8. Service Systems, 9. The Internet, 10. Java and the Nee Internet Programming Paradigm, 11. The Microsoft Paradigm, 12. Embedded Systems and Brave New Worlds; 13. Past, Present, and Future, and Appendix An Updated Programmer's Bookshelf.