Nico Loubser - Software Engineering for Absolute Beginners: Your Guide to Creating Software Products

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-6621-2 . For more detailed information, please visit www.apress.com/source-code .

Writing software is a multi-disciplinary exercise. This makes it especially difficult for people who want to learn how to create software but are without someone guiding them and helping them navigate their way between all of the technologies and methodologies there are to learn. The aim of this book is not just to teach, but also to guide the newcomer, showing where the learning efforts should be concentrated, what is good practice, and what are some of the industry standards in the current software development industry. This book bridges the divide between just writing code and creating software systems.

This book is not just for the complete newcomer. It is also for someone who can already write code, but is interested in creating complete software projects, from inception to delivery, as well as software design practices.

As a software developer, I can wholeheartedly tell you that writing code is only a part of todays software development paradigm. In todays world, you need to have learned, and in some cases mastered, a set of specific tools, skills, and methodologies that will help you achieve your goals as a creator of software. Whether that goal is to become a hobbyist developer, whether you want to create a startup or work for a corporation, good software engineering skills are very important. Most people will pick up a book about programming, or go on the Internet and start learning how to write code. Very few people will read a book on software engineering principles, and not everyone is so lucky to start in a job where serious engineering principles are followed and enforced and where proper tools are used.

Certain principles in software development remain the same, regardless of which company you work for. If you consider a company with 200 employees and a 1,000,000 clients, and compare it to a company with 2 employees and 150 customers, you should notice two things. The bigger company has different problems to solve with regards to infrastructure, scalability, and keeping their code base clean with a potentially large development team. The second thing you should notice is that both companies also have similar problems to solve, such as security, keeping the code base clean, deployments, writing clean code, and using proper software engineering principles to design good code. Even if you build a website for your cousins brake skimming business, security, proper coding principles, and architectural principles are very important.

A company that serves 100 customers a month should not have its software written in an ad hoc, shoot-from-the-hip fashion. If your complete user base, whether it is 100 people or 1,000,000 people, depends on a software product, then it means buggy code will affect 100% of your client base. No company can afford to have their client base affected to this extent.

By no means does this book suggest to over-engineer your software solutions. If you are writing software that reads the temperature in your garden into a database every minute of every day, emails you a graph every month, and your brother can log in online to check the temperature in your garden, then you dont need a supercool Kubernetes cluster on AWS. You do, however, need a clean code design that is easily modifiable, secure code, and version control. You may think no one will hack into your system, and you will be dead wrong. Not all hacking is for financial gain. Some hacking attempts are for bragging rights, which is more than enough incentive to deface your website. If a simple input field is left unprotected, like a telephone number input field, your whole database can be trashed, stolen, or corrupted.

A while ago a friend started to learn how to program. He struggled initially because some of the concepts that were covered were intended for someone with a coding background. Reviewing the literature he was using, I noticed that they also basically all excluded a comprehensive approach to creating software. I saw this as two problems. Firstly, some of the beginner material out there caters to people with some knowledge about programming. This is not the end of the world. You are all intelligent enough to put the pieces together and learn from material that is intended for someone with more knowledge. But it was this aspect that made learning more difficult for my friend. Secondly, there was also the absence of the processes to build comprehensively good systems. So I decided to create this book.

My aim for this book is to show a complete beginner the cornerstones of creating easily readable, maintainable, editable, and releasable software that can be adapted and changed as needed. I wanted to touch on the principles and knowledge needed to create great software productsmore aspects of software development than just writing code. As mentioned, software engineering is a vast discipline that requires many technical skills and knowledge to create great software products.