Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.1
EAN num: 9780201504248
ISBN number: 0201504243
Label: Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd)
Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 271
Printing Date: 1989-06
Publishing house: Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd)
Sale Popularity Level: 1527471
Studio: Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd)
User popularity level:
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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.
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