| Software Engineering Mathematics (Sei Series in Software Engineering) |  | Authors: Jim Woodcock, Martin Loomes
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd)
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1851462
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 271
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.8 x 0.8
ISBN: 0201504243
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.1
EAN: 9780201504248
ASIN: 0201504243
Publication Date: June 1989
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This book makes the mathematical basis of formal methods accessible both to the student and to the professional. It is motivated in the later chapters by examples and exercises. Throughout, the premise is that mathematics is as essential to design and construction in software engineering as it is to other engineering disciplines. The exercises range from simple drills, intended to provide familiarity with concepts and notation, to advanced material. The first four chapters of the book are devoted to foundations, with an introduction to formal systems, then the propositional and predicate calculi, concluding with a chapter on theories in general. The second part of the book builds upon the foundations by covering in detail the theory of sets, relations, functions, and sequences. The mathematical data types then presented are powerful enough to describe many aspects of software systems, and small case studies are included as examples of their use in the modelling of software: a configuration manager, a storage allocator, and a simple backing store interface. The concrete syntax of the Z notation has been adopted. The third part of the book presents two detailed case studies in the use of mathematics in software engineering. The first is the specification of the behaviour of a telephone exchange, and the second illustrates the importance of the development of a mathematical theory in gaining an understanding of a system. Both case studies stress the roles of modelling and of proof in the construction of specifications. The final part describes the algebraic approach to specification and then summarizes and compares the various formal techniques.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Traditional Math Wrapped in the Z Specification Language August 3, 2006
J. A. Zimmer (Oklahoma, U.S.A.)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Mathematics is a way of describing things that permits exact reasoning
about some of the properties. The properties you cannot reason about
are abstracted away in the descriptive process. The trick of
abstracting to get important properties, the preciseness required of the
descriptions, and the careful steps in the reasoning about properties
are the skills you have to learn to do mathematics.
To use mathematics is another matter. For that you need is to understand
somebody else's description well enough to apply it. Here "apply" means
to describe how the model fits what you are working on and then use existing
features of the model to check properties you care about.
Traditional engineering is about using mathematics. Software
engineering is more about doing mathematics. The reason for this
difference is that traditional engineering applies well worn practices
and software engineering is almost always involved in creating something
quite different than what came before.
A good book on software engineering mathematics will, like this one, teach
you a descriptive process as it teaches you the traditional mathematical
concepts. The descriptive framework covered by this book is called Z. It
came out of Britain and is pronounced "zed". It is way under utilized in
the U.S. but for an American book written from a more applied point of view
see "The way of Z" by Jonathan Jacky. Some of you may have to read that
before you find this one interesting.
I used to teach a graduate course in discrete structures to masters students
in computer science. Had I been aware of this book then, I would have
used it as a text.
 Kindle edition badly formatted March 2, 2010
James (Spain)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Kindle Edition is badly formatted, with missing symbols (replaced by 'iconid="xx"'), ASCII replacements for logic symbols (V and /\ for OR and AND, which looks really bad in a serif font) and formulae which look like scanned images from the book (sometimes the wrong images).
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