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- Path: sparky!uunet!eiffel!bertrand
- From: bertrand@eiffel.com (Bertrand Meyer)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel
- Subject: Re: Intro. book on Eiffel Programming...?
- Message-ID: <107@eiffel.eiffel.com>
- Date: 29 Jul 92 17:08:57 GMT
- References: <Brssyv.Boo@news.cso.uiuc.edu> <pyhmn2d.nagle@netcom.com> <GEOFF.92Jul28092531@wodehouse.flash.bellcore.com>
- Organization: Interactive Software Engineering, Santa Barbara CA
- Lines: 49
-
- From <GEOFF.92Jul28092531@wodehouse.flash.bellcore.com>
- by geoff@flash.bellcore.com (Geoffrey Clemm):
-
- >> I've also
- >> heard a rumor that _OOSC II_ is actively in the works. Anyone care to
- >> confirm or deny?
- >
- > [...] The problem is that
- > although most of the changes needed for OOSC are trivial, there are a
- > few sections which could do with a significant upgrade.
- > My guess is that Bertrand can't
- > bring himself to just upgrade the sample programs in OOSC from 2.3 to 3.0
- > without also changing the sections that would involve more work.
-
- Yes, there will be a second edition sometime, and, yes, it will involve
- more than upgrading the Eiffel examples. (I did that at some point and
- it took me about two hours for the entire book.) In addition, I can
- reasonably commit to ensuring publication in the 20th century.
- To say anything else would be rather foolish.
-
- I have found that revising an existing book is harder than writing
- a new one. Part of the problem is the maintainability issue which
- we all know in its application to software, but which no one has
- apparently solved for books. I don't know how to write a book the way one
- writes an Eiffel system (out of modular, decentralized components,
- meant for reusability and extendibility). Instead a book's
- structure is a strict top-down functional decomposition a` la Pascal
- (main book, chapters, sections, subsections, paragraphs, sentences,
- words), which causes the well-known associated maintainability problems.
- (See the book itself for details.) In addition, the structure must be
- physically mapped onto fixed-size pages, a pretty harsh requirement.
-
- Adding to the problem are the incredibly positive reactions triggered
- by the current edition. (I say this without any arrogance or pretention,
- it's just the reality.) This background puts a heavy burden on
- the author for the second edition.
-
- Lest anyone think this is all a commercial ploy meant to encourage
- people to buy the first edition until the last minute, I won't be
- coy about announcing the second edition (on comp.lang.eiffel
- in particular) when I send it to the publisher, even if the printing
- is still a few months away then. But we are nowhere close to such a
- situation.
-
- Thanks for the continued gentle pressure.
- --
- -- Bertrand Meyer
- Interactive Software Engineering Inc., Santa Barbara
- bertrand@eiffel.com
-