If a “computer professional” is like a surveyor, then a surveyor-like certification may be needed. This book is about the first step in such a certification, namely, certification as an “associate computer professional.” Fortunately, other approaches to our profession exist. They explicitly acknowledge that programming is a difficult mathematical discipline [1,2]. The results of the former approach are too well known--just scan any trade publication.

The book consists of a “General Section” and a “Language Section.” This section covers seven languages, from BASIC to RPG and Ada, usually without “advanced features” like pointers, but with detailed descriptions of formatting. The book discusses some concepts and lots of tools for data processing. It includes an enormous amount of material--from deferrals and accruals to random variables, and from network topologies to ring structures. The presentation is shallow. Too often both important concepts and unimportant details and tools are considered on an equal footing, so a proper perspective on computing does not follow from the material. The overall impression is of a neat (and not necessarily appealing) discipline with all major problems solved, with well-understood stages of the system development life cycle and well-understood methods for each stage. In this manner, software development, both in the small and in the large, is trivialized, leading to a proliferation of “average professional programmers,” as happened in the 1960s. The authors strive for simplicity in the following manner: “Overall, EDP, as a profession, should try to express itself in more nontechnical language. There is too much use of acronyms that are often meaningless. Basically, EDP literature should become more user-oriented” (p. 153). It is unlikely that this description of “EDP” includes software development. The authors omit the most important concepts--abstraction and algorithms.

The authors state that the book’s audience is “soon-to-be-graduated computer science and information systems students and those individuals with two years or less of pertinent experience” (p. 3). Such a student should have a much deeper understanding of our profession than is provided by this book. An individual with some experience usually needs a significant amount of (formal or informal) education (rather than training). Moreover, the authors try to demonstrate that “real-life” software development has almost nothing to do with what is taught in college. Again, the results of this approach are too well known.

The “managerial” approach and advice of the authors are traditional and strongly mainframe- and trivial-application-oriented. Some errors of the past are repeated. A good example is the recommendation (p. 94) to position trainees to do maintenance based on the observation that “maintenance of poorly documented application systems is one of the most difficult, unrewarding, boring, and discouraging of activities”--no wonder that it takes an enormous amount of effort and often leads to disastrous results, both for the system and for the trainees themselves.

The authors make statements like “the process is called floating point” (p. 15); “efficiency is the best testimony of a programmer’s skills” (p. 34); “the disadvantages of a subroutine library include a reduction in flexibility” (p. 39); “interactive languages are those that may be directly entered into the computer and operated in interaction with the computer. Included here are BASIC,…some forms of FORTRAN,…APL,…ALGOL…” (p. 64); “the long-distance transmission of data is an extraordinary cost” (p. 101); “multiplication [of both sides of an inequality] by a negative number or zero may not produce the same equivalence” (p. 158); and “the…mathematician would assign a 0.0 probability to the event that the sum of two positive integers will yield a negative integer” (p. 182). Their approach to programming may be exemplified by the following statement (p. 40–41): “Years ago, a lot of desk checking was done. Because hardware was expensive relative to the cost of people’s time, programmers spent a lot of time examining their code. Today, we have learned that the computer can be a much more effective diagnostician than a human being can.” Later, on page 103, we find an explanation: the authors state that “today’s programmer does not have to be concerned with the intricacies of programming logic” because “the screens to be used and the reports to be generated by the program have become the main elements of the programming.” Initiated readers may decide for themselves whether to consider this approach a gross error.

E. W. Dijkstra noted in 1976 that the teaching of programming is equivalent to the teaching of thinking. As a corollary, programming is an exciting activity. This book features neither of these ideas. It also lacks a reference list.