CSE 331 Software Design & Implementation

The aim of this course is to help students write programs of higher quality and increased complexity. This requires creating software that is correct, easy to change, easy to understand, and easy to scale. The course covers principled approaches to achieving each of these.

The only formal prerequisite is CSE 143. We will very much rely on a thorough understanding of the concepts from CSE 143 as well as Java programming skills. We will go much further and you will be challenged to approach software development much differently than you have in CSE 143 or other courses.

The aim of this course is to help students write programs of higher quality and increased complexity. This requires creating software that is (1) correct, (2) easy to change, (3) easy to understand, and (4) easy to scale. We will study principled approaches to achieving these four goals.

After completing this course successfully students should be able to:

• Successfully build medium-scale software projects in principled ways
• Understand the role of specifications and abstractions and how to verify that an implementation is correct, including effective testing and verification strategies and the use of formal reasoning
• Analyze a software development problem and be able to design effective program structures to solve it, including appropriate modularity, separation of abstraction and implementation concerns, use of standard design patterns to solve recurring design problems, and use of standard libraries
• Use modern programming languages effectively, including understanding type systems, objects and classes, modularity, notions of identity and equality, and proper use of exceptions and assertions
• Use and learn new contemporary software tools, including integrated development environments, test frameworks, debuggers, version control, and documentation processing tools

In this class, we will use Java and associated tools like IntelliJ, JUnit, JavaDoc, and git, but the goal is to understand the underlying ideas and concepts that are generally applicable to software construction.

Texts

The required text for the course is the following:

• Effective Java by Joshua Bloch, 3rd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2018.

Contains a great deal of distilled wisdom about Java best practices, technical details, and style issues.

There will be assigned readings from this book during the quarter, and there will be questions on the exams about those readings.

Besides the required text, the following books may be helpful to you:

• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, 20th anniversary (2nd) edition, Addison-Wesley, 2020.

Contains a great deal of distilled wisdom about software construction and the craft of programming, including many things that those who read the book later in their careers wish they had learned early on.

• Program Development in Java by Barbara Liskov and John Guttag, 1st ed, Addison Wesley, 2000.

The content of this well-written book closely mirrors much of the content of the course. The only downside is that it was written 17 years ago, so it is out-of-date with regard to some of key parts of the Java language and libraries. Nonetheless, it is a good place to look for another presentation of the material covered in class, if you can ignore those parts.

• Core Java Vol. I - Fundamentals by Cay Horstmann, 10th ed, Prentice-Hall, 2016; 11th ed, 2018.

This is a good general reference for the Java language and basic libraries. While technical documentation for these things is available on the web, the discussions in a book like this one are usually easier to follow and typically include advice not found in the formal documentation. Either recent edition will cover what we need for CSE 331.