Review by Billy Barron, Tek-Tools

"Software Fundamentals Collected Papers by David L. Parnas" (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-70369-6) is a book of papers by David L. Parnas. Mr. Parnas according to the book is a great academic researcher in software engineering. However, even though I have a MS in Computer Science and studied software engineering more than most people I have never heard of him before nor have I seen or heard about any of these papers.

The book contains 33 papers. The papers range from ones that are extremely dated and obsolete, which are only useful from a historical prespective to economics to the SDI (aka StarWars) to a handful of really useful papers for certain niches, like real time, to the responsibilities of software engineering.

The most ironic interesting paper in a humorous way is the one in Chapter 30 in which, Mr. Parnis says "My point is that the papers are not good papers, but simply that they have not been influential" about his own papers. The cover of the book talks about how "influential" his papers are.

His point is that his papers largely only influences researchers not the programmers out in the field. This pretty much sums up my feelings about this book. Most of the papers are only of interest to CS researchers. A couple are applicable to us designers and developers out doing the work.