Introduction to Software Engineering/Preface

Preface

When preparing an undergraduate class on Software Engineering, I found that there are a lot of good articles in Wikipedia covering different aspects related to software engineering. For a beginner, however, it is not so easy to find her or his way through that jungle of articles. It is not evident what is important and what is less relevant, where to start and what to skip in a first reading. Also, these articles contain too much information and too few examples. Hence the idea for this book came about: to take the relevant articles from Wikipedia, combine them, edit them, fill in the missing pieces, put them in context and create a wikibook out of them.

The hope is that this can be used as a textbook for an introductory software engineering class. The advantage for the instructor is that she can just pick the pieces that fit into her course and create a collection. The advantage for the student is that he can have a printed or pdf version of the textbook at a reasonable price (free) and with reasonable licenses (creative commons).

As for the philosophy behind this book: brevity is preferred to completeness, and examples are preferred to theory. If this effort was successful, you be the judge of it, and if you have suggestions for improvement, just use the ’Edit’ button!

My special thanks go to Adrignola and Kayau who did the tedious work of importing the original articles (with all their history) from Wikipedia to Wikibooks!