The Essence of Program Design

The Prentice Hall Essence of Computing Series privides a concise practical and uniform introduction to the core components of an undergraduate computer science degree. Acknowledging recent changes within Higher Education, this approach uses a variety of pedagogical tools-case studies, worked examples and self-test questions to underpin the student's learning.

Program Design is about the way that the programmer creates a structure for their program. The theme of this book is that there are a number of commonly used approaches to program design. Each approach is valid within its own area of application, but some methods are general purpose; other have a specific application area. This book provides the information that enables prgrammers to select the method that is best for themselves and for the application. It describes the varied range of design methods available to the programmer, with each method explained, assessed and compared. It is aimed at students who have used one prgramming language and who have written seveal small-to-medium sized programs. The language used may have been Ada. Basic, C, C++COBOL, Pascal, Smalltalk etc., but this book does not use any particular programming language.