It’s time we did something about our colleges and universities turning out armies of programmers who know how to code, but very little about how to get from a set of requirements through a well-factored design, and then to a maintainable set of code. One of the main goals of the Theory and Practice book is to provide a suitable text for a computer science course in this area.

We’ve written this book as a teaching book. Chapters are organized into Theory, Practice, and More Practice sections. The Theory sections explain the concepts, and include small, thought-provoking exercises. The Practice sections present examples with mistakes deliberately left in, and present the answers to these questions a few pages later. The More Practice section at the end presents challenge questions, half multiple-choice, and half essay. If you’re a computer science instructor and would like to build a course around this book, email us, we’d like to talk with you.