Maciaszek L.A. and Liong B.L. (2005):
Practical Software Engineering
Addison Wesley, 864p.

the main distinguishing feature of the book is in its subtitle - A Case-Study Approach. If you believe - as many educators do - that the best teaching formula is to teach by example then this book is for you. If you want to be challenged and invited to learning from mistakes then this book gives you plenty of opportunity to experiment with your solutions and compare them with the authors' answers and explanations. If on top of that, you would like to customize learning to your current needs and level of knowledge then each iteration has different emphasis, different modeling difficulty and may demand a different subset of development techniques and models.

An overriding objective of this book is to relate theories to reality by giving special attention to software design and implementation (while not neglecting analysis) and by addressing non-trivial practical problems. In its objective of "exemplifying to explain", the book is unique in a number of ways:

1.      Education in mind. The book was written with education in mind. The case-study, examples and problem-solving exercises are not just plainly taken from real-world solutions; they are molded to suit educational needs. Real-world solutions are part of a complex business and software implementation context. That context is likely to be overwhelming and uninteresting to the reader, so it is simplified as much as possible. Presentation of GUI and database designs as well as programming examples eliminates unnecessary dependencies, "information noise" and repetitive tasks.

2.      Annotated solutions.  There are no black-or-white, true-false, zero-one solutions in information systems. Frequently, a solution serves a particular purpose and may look plainly wrong when analyzed from a different perspective. Therefore, answers and solutions are carefully annotated.

3.      Alternative solutions.  Sometimes a single solution, no matter how annotated and explained, is not distinguishingly better from other potential solutions. To this aim, alternative solutions are frequently provided and explained.

4.      Lists of key terms at the end of each chapter compiled as indexes with references to page numbers. The lists can be used for self-study reviews of the understanding of the basic terminology introduced in each chapter. They can also be used by instructors to query the students' knowledge of each chapter.

5.      Review questions to reinforce the reader's knowledge by insightful questions to each chapter. The questions are divided, when appropriate, into discussion questions and case-study questions. Answers to all review questions are available to instructors from the book's website.

6.      Problem-solving exercises to challenge the reader to research the issues before attempting a solution and to attempt extended or alternative solutions to the case-study, minicases or other examples. Sample solutions to all review questions are available to instructors from the book's website.

7.      Website with complete set of supporting material, including models and programming code (mostly UML, Java and database (Oracle) code). All programming code, including code not presented in the text, is available on the book's website.

8.      Emphasis on principles.  There are some well-defined principles (patterns, frameworks, standards, libraries, etc.) of good software engineering and system development. The book identifies and explains these principles and makes linkages to sources of information.

9.      Balanced mixture of professional depth and educational benefit. In general, writing software and writing educational books are somewhat disjoint activities. Hopefully, this book contradicts this observation.

Substituting for professional education and training courses.  Busy professionals tend to perform routine tasks and they can quickly fall behind the state-of-art and frequently the state-of-practice in the discipline. Finding time and funds to attend expensive professional education and training courses with case-studies similar to those in this book may be difficult. Perhaps this book can give professionals an opportunity to catch up on latest developments at the time of their choice or in-between normal work duties.