Abstraction For Programmers

Liskov (engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Guttag (computer science and engineering, also at MIT) present a component- based methodology for software program development. The book focuses on modular program construction: how to get the modules right and how to organize a program as a collection of modules. It explains the key types of abstractions, demonstrates how to develop specifications that define these abstractions, and illustrates how to implement them using numerous examples. An introduction to key Java concepts is included. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

"This book is meant to provide an introduction to the controlled use of abstraction in planning and designing computer programs"--Preface

Your success—and sanity—are closer at hand when you work at a higher level of abstraction, allowing your attention to be on the business problem rather than the details of the programming platform. Domain Specific Languages—"little languages" implemented on top of conventional programming languages—give you a way to do this because they model the domain of your business problem. DSLs in Action introduces the concepts and definitions a developer needs to build high-quality domain specific languages. It provides a solid foundation to the usage as well as implementation aspects of a DSL, focusing on the necessity of applications speaking the language of the domain. After reading this book, a programmer will be able to design APIs that make better domain models. For experienced developers, the book addresses the intricacies of domain language design without the pain of writing parsers by hand. The book discusses DSL usage and implementations in the real world based on a suite of JVM languages like Java, Ruby, Scala, and Groovy. It contains code snippets that implement real world DSL designs and discusses the pros and cons of each implementation. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside Tested, real-world examples How to find the right level of abstraction Using language features to build internal DSLs Designing parser/combinator-based little languages

"Abstraction and Specification in Program Development" offers professionals in program design and software engineering a methodology that will enable them to construct programs that are reliable and reasonably easy to understand, modify, and maintain. Good programming involves the systematic mastery of complexity, and this book provides the first unified treatment of the techniques of abstraction and specification, which, the authors argue, are the linchpin of any effective approach to programming. They place particular emphasis on the use of data abstraction to produce highly modular programs.The authors focus on the process of decomposing large program projects into independent modules that can be assigned to independent working groups. They discuss methods of decomposition, the kinds of modules that are most useful in this process, and techniques to increase the likelihood that modules produced can in fact be recombined to solve the original programming problem. There are many examples of abstractions throughout the text, and each chapter ends with pertinent references and exercises.Most of the sample implementations in the book are written in CLU, one of a growing number of languages able to support data abstraction. Sufficient material is included, however, to allow the reader to work in Pascal as well.The material in this book was developed by the authors during a decade of teaching undergraduate, graduate, and professional-level courses. Barbara Liskov, the developer of CLU, is Professor and John Guttag an Associate Professor of Computer Science at MIT. "Abstraction and Specification in Program Development" is included in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science series.

Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field provides a concise characterization of key ideas that lie at the core of computer science (CS) research. The book offers a description of CS research recognizing the richness and diversity of the field. It brings together two dozen essays on diverse aspects of CS research, their motivation and results. By describing in accessible form computer science's intellectual character, and by conveying a sense of its vibrancy through a set of examples, the book aims to prepare readers for what the future might hold and help to inspire CS researchers in its creation.

Written by a world-renowned expert on programming methodology, and the winner of the 2008 Turing Award, this book shows how to build production-quality programs--programs that are reliable, easy to maintain, and quick to modify. Its emphasis is on modular program construction: how to get the modules right and how to organize a program as a collection of modules. The book presents a methodology effective for either an individual programmer, who may be writing a small program or a single module in a larger one; or a software engineer, who may be part of a team developing a complex program comprised of many modules. Both audiences will acquire a solid foundation for object-oriented program design and component-based software development from this methodology. Because each module in a program corresponds to an abstraction, such as a collection of documents or a routine to search the collection for documents of interest, the book first explains the kinds of abstractions most useful to programmers: procedures; iteration abstractions; and, most critically, data abstractions. Indeed, the author treats data abstraction as the central paradigm in object-oriented program design and implementation. The author also shows, with numerous examples, how to develop informal specifications that define these abstractions--specifications that describe what the modules do--and then discusses how to implement the modules so that they do what they are supposed to do with acceptable performance. Other topics discussed include: Encapsulation and the need for an implementation to provide the behavior defined by the specification Tradeoffs between simplicity and performance Techniques to help readers of code understand and reason about it, focusing on such properties as rep invariants and abstraction functions Type hierarchy and its use in defining families of related data abstractions Debugging, testing, and requirements analysis Program design as a top-down, iterative process, and design patterns The Java programming language is used for the book's examples. However, the techniques presented are language independent, and an introduction to key Java concepts is included for programmers who may not be familiar with the language.

A completely revised edition, offering new design recipes for interactive programs and support for images as plain values, testing, event-driven programming, and even distributed programming. This introduction to programming places computer science at the core of a liberal arts education. Unlike other introductory books, it focuses on the program design process, presenting program design guidelines that show the reader how to analyze a problem statement, how to formulate concise goals, how to make up examples, how to develop an outline of the solution, how to finish the program, and how to test it. Because learning to design programs is about the study of principles and the acquisition of transferable skills, the text does not use an off-the-shelf industrial language but presents a tailor-made teaching language. For the same reason, it offers DrRacket, a programming environment for novices that supports playful, feedback-oriented learning. The environment grows with readers as they master the material in the book until it supports a full-fledged language for the whole spectrum of programming tasks. This second edition has been completely revised. While the book continues to teach a systematic approach to program design, the second edition introduces different design recipes for interactive programs with graphical interfaces and batch programs. It also enriches its design recipes for functions with numerous new hints. Finally, the teaching languages and their IDE now come with support for images as plain values, testing, event-driven programming, and even distributed programming.