Software fundamentals

What Hacker News says

1. rramadassMar 2025
   Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L. Parnas is an excellent compendium of Parnas' papers. You will find more wisdom here than most books on "Software Engineering" being published today.
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2. igibbsNov 2023
   'Elements of Programming' by Stepanov and McJones

   'Software Fundamentals' by Hoffman and Weiss,

   'Writing Solid Code' by Maguire,

   'Code Complete' by McConnell

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3. rramadassSep 2023
   A Classic.

   Folks interested in studying more of Parnas' foundational papers should checkout the book Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L.Parnas. A good antidote to "cargo culting".

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4. breckNov 2022
   I exchanged a few emails with Fred over the years. RIP Fred. Thank you so much for all the wisdom. Sharing one of the last responses here:

       Thanks for your kind words.  You will find lots of condensed wisdom in the three software books I 
       value most:
       
       DeMarco & Lister Peopleware
   
       2007. Software engineering: Barry Boehm's lifetime contributions to software development, 
       management and research. Ed. by Richard Selby.
   
       Hoffman, Daniel M.; Weiss David M. (Eds.): Software Fundamentals – Collected Papers by David L. 
       Parnas, 2001, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-70369-6.
   
       You might also like my later book on technical design in general:  The Design of Design.  Start 
       with Part II.

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5. rramadassFeb 2022
   I think it is worthwhile to first look into the fields of Complexity Science/Complex Systems Science and Systems Thinking/Systems Theory for overarching insights : [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system and https://complexityexplained.github.io/ ] and [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking and https://thesystemsthinker.com/systems-thinking-what-why-when... ]

   For Software specific issues i highly recommend David Parnas' collected papers in the book Software Fundamentals. He and his colleagues defined much of what is mainstream in today's Software Architecture/Organization practice.

   Finally, the case studies given here are a great source of insights: https://aosabook.org/en/index.html

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6. rramadassMay 2020
   Thank you. Every Software Engineer should read Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L.Parnas. People are nitpicking things and just parroting what is written in other books without really understanding the idea behind it all. For example what is a Interface/Class/Library/Framework/Module(logical and physical) if not Information Hiding at different levels? The concept is the same but the realization is different. OOD/OOP just gives you convenient syntactic sugar to express them. The rest is up to you.
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