Re: Learning to Engineer. Where to begin?

["M. A. Alves" <maa@liacc.up.pt>]

> The process of Engineering a piece of software is something I'd like to learn
> in-depth. The question is, what materials should I invest in which would
> give me a good return on that investment?
>
> I've ordered the complete set of "The Art of Programming" books by Donald
> Knuth, and the "Dragon" books by Aho.

These are very fine books, but not of software engineering.

> I'm also spending alot of time over at the SEI site, reading any
> articles there I can get my hands on.

The articles may be too specialised for a beginner.  Start with a software
engineering "textbook" to get an overview of the techniques, _then_ study
one of them in dept (then another, then another... ;-)

The textbook on my shelf is

  Software Engineering : An Engineering Approach / James F. Peters ;
  Witold Pedrycz. -- Wiley, 2000. -- xviii, 702 p. -- (ISBN 0-471-18964-2)

Of course there are others, maybe better ones.

Before buying take a look at a software engineering curriculum, to get a
sense of the different aspects and denotations of the term, and compare
the tables of contents of the books.

For example my book is weak in object-oriented development, altough this
can be an important curricular item.

Good luck.

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