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Practical software development techniques : tools and techniques for building enterprise software
Crookshanks E., Apress, New York, NY, 2014. 212 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484207-29-1)
Date Reviewed: Mar 18 2015

Software hiring managers and technology recruiters are often said to complain that new college graduates possess theoretical knowledge but lack practical software skills in areas such as version control, testing, and interpreting business requirements. So where can novice software developers learn about these topics if not in their college courses? Crookshanks’ book discusses these topics and provides resources for beginning software developers. The intent is to help graduates overcome their lack of practical experience and become more familiar with some standard industry practices and common tools.

Nine topics are covered in separate chapters: version control, unit testing and test-driven development, refactoring, build tools and continuous integration, debugging, development life cycles and the software development life cycle (SDLC), design patterns and architecture, software requirements, and basic structured query language (SQL).

Some of the chapters give a very short discussion of the theory of a topic (such as version control) before spending the rest of the time covering specific tools. For example, Subversion (SVN) and the corresponding TortoiseSVN plugin are used to illustrate version control and how to do things such as resolving conflicts, tagging, and branching. This has the advantage of showing how the theory really works in practice. The disadvantage is that the discussion of tools sometimes reverts to a mechanical sort of “click this, then enter this” how-to discussion rather than providing any insight into the topic or the tool. And as the author concedes, the examples are of necessity limited; not every relevant topic can be included. Not all chapters stick to their title topic. The software requirements chapter, for example, has only four pages on requirements, but covers functional and design specifications and change control in the remaining ten pages. The chapters are independent for the most part, and readers can skip around according to their needs.

Four appendices and an index complete the book. Appendix A discusses enterprise topics such as working as an employee versus contracting. Appendix B provides review questions for each chapter. These are mostly discussion type questions intended to help prepare answers for interview questions. Since the topics are covered in the main text, no answers are provided. It might have made more sense to include these questions at the end of the chapters. Appendix C has some additional SQL details, including scripts for creating the sample SQL database used. Appendix D lists a dozen references and another dozen additional suggested readings.

The book seems to be lacking a final editorial pass. There are numerous typographical errors. Some of the references give the wrong figure number or location, saying the figure is on the next page or the same page when it is somewhere else. Numerous screen shots are included, some of which are too small or fuzzy to be clear, and all of the figures are in black and white despite references in the text to things like “the red exclamation point.” Although a website for the book is mentioned where various scripts can be downloaded, the uniform resource locator (URL) doesn’t seem to be given anywhere. The book is also a bit dated--it was written in 2011, but has a copyright date of 2014. This is mostly an issue when discussing the currently available versions of tools.

The book does a reasonable job of collecting in one place introductions to some practical topics that new programmers will need throughout their careers. New college graduates who have not had internships or summer programming jobs might find it particularly useful.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  Andrew R. Huber Review #: CR143249 (1506-0441)
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