Reviews for Software engineering

The average rating for Software engineering based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-31 00:00:00 David Preaus The extra star is for the excessive effort these guys had to put in for what they did. It was not very effective. The biggest problem of this book is that it's full of confusing explanations the designers hoped would be "heuristic." This problem permeates the work from start to finish. The use of the special commands by the authors, not part of standard scheme, makes very little sense in most classroom settings that teach Scheme in the hopes of teaching functional programming. The whole idea of functional programming is that you have a bare group of essential concepts AND commands, and work your way from there. I had the great misfortune of taking a class where we weren't allowed to use the specially designed scheme commands for this book, but still had to buy it. If you are in that predicament, the book is completely worthless. Furthermore, while I admire the author's desire to prepare people for SICP, their treatment of this task borders on arrogance. At one point they actually suggest that "SICP was designed for MIT students" and that the rest of us aren't worthy of it yet. Quite frankly for anybody willing to take the time, SICP is not as terrifying as these guys make it out to be. This is a weak book.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-09-04 00:00:00 Travis Knight A unique, eye-opening introduction to Computer Science / Programming. Functional Programming in Scheme taught here serves as a nice background for the famous SICP book.