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Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts 2009th Edition

by Bertrand Meyer (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 13 ratings
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From object technology pioneer and ETH Zurich professor Bertrand Meyer, winner of the Jolt award and the ACM Software System Award, a revolutionary textbook that makes learning programming fun and rewarding. Meyer builds his presentation on a rich object-oriented software system supporting graphics and multimedia, which students can use to produce impressive applications from day one, then understand inside out as they learn new programming techniques.

Unique to Touch of Class is a combination of a practical, hands-on approach to programming with the introduction of sound theoretical support focused on helping students learn the construction of high quality software. The use of full color brings exciting programming concepts to life.

Among the useful features of the book is the use of Design by Contract, critical to software quality and providing a gentle introduction to formal methods.

Will give students a major advantage by teaching professional-level techniques in a literate, relaxed and humorous way.

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  1. ISBN-10
    3540921443
  2. ISBN-13
    978-3540921448
  3. Edition
    2009th
  4. Publisher
    Springer
  5. Publication date
    September 11, 2009
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    8 x 1.75 x 10.75 inches
  8. Print length
    940 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

From the reviews:

“This book ‘is not just about learning to program but about ’Learning to program Well.’’ Meyer’s latest text conveys his impressive experience in the field of computer science, going well beyond just software engineering. … the target audience includes both students and teachers. …The large quantity of information provided is well organized. … Colors are plentiful and character fonts play an important role. …Coming from a father of object orientation and software quality, it is not surprising that this is an excellent book.” (Alexandre Bergel, ACM Computing Reviews, January, 2010)

“The best thing about this book, and it is a very good thing indeed, is that it is thorough. … The material is well-written and thorough – it includes introductory material aimed at the student, then at the instructor. … this is an excellent book. If I were put in the position of needing to teach an elementary programming course … this would be high on my list of candidate textbooks.” (Robert L. Glass, The Software Practitioner, January-February, 2010)

“This nicely written and enjoyable textbook is used for the ‘Introduction to programming’ course taught at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) to all entering computing science students. … In addition to the excellent book, Meyer provides an outstanding web site (http://touch.ethz.ch/) with a huge amount of material including course slides, video recording of lectures, slides for exercise sessions, a lot of information for instructors, software downloads, and, of course, blogs and wikis.” (Haim Kilov, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1188, 2010)

"Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts" (ToC) is an excellent book to read. (…) Instead of teaching a whole lot of details from the bottom up, it explains from the top, giving the whole picture, why things are done and then down to the details of how they are done. Meyer also calls this outside-in. You can see the whole at once and then explain the details. This is how programming should be ― using broad concepts, rather than narrow implementation details. ( Ian Joyner on https://siliconvalleyhype.quora.com/, Jan 2022).

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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Springer
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 11, 2009
  • Edition ‏ : ‎ 2009th
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 940 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 3540921443
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-3540921448
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.3 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8 x 1.75 x 10.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 13 ratings

About the author

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Bertrand Meyer

Bertrand Meyer

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Latest book (2023): Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis, Springer

A concise but comprehensive review of requirements engineering. Includes a standard plan for writing modern requirements. Covers requirements writing, requirements elicitation, uses and limitations of scenarios (use cases, user stories), formal approaches to requirements, object-oriented requirements...

Complemented by teaching materials and templates for writing rquirements.

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Bertrand Meyer is Provost and Professor of Software Engineering at Constructor Institute, Schaffhausen, Switzerland. He was previously at ETH Zurich. He is Founder and CTO of Eiffel Software, Santa Barbara, California.

He is the initial designer of the Eiffel method and language and has continued to participate in its evolution. He also directed the development of the EiffelStudio environment, compiler, tools and libraries through their successive versions.

His previous book, published in May 2014, is an irreverent, in-depth introduction to agile methods: "Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly" (Springer), the first book to take a critical look at agile development and sort out the productive and damaging ideas.

His previous book is an influential an introduction to programming, "Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well, Using Object Technology and Contracts", based on more than a decade of teaching introductory programming at ETH and now supported by a MOOC (http://se.ethz.ch/mooc/programming).

Earlier books include "Object-Oriented Software Construction" (a general presentation of object technology, winner of the 1998 Jolt Award); "Eiffel: The Language" (description of the Eiffel language); "Object Success" (a discussion of object technology for managers); "Reusable Software" (a discussion of reuse issues and solutions); "Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages". He has also authored numerous articles (see publication list) and edited or co-edited several dozen conference proceedings, including the 2005 "Verified Software".

Other activities include: chair of the TOOLS conference series ; director of the LASER summer school on software engineering (taking place every year since 2003 in early September in Elba island, Italy); member, and chair since 2009, of the IFIP TC2 committee (Software technology); member of the IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology; member of the French Academy of Technologies. He is also active as a consultant (object-oriented system design, architectural reviews, technology assessment), trainer in object technology and other software topics, and conference speaker.

Awards include ACM Software System Award, IEEE Harlan D. Mills prize, Fellow of the ACM, Dahl-Nygaard Prize, and an honorary doctorate from University of York (UK).

Prior to founding Eiffel Software in 1985, Meyer had a 9-year technical and managerial career at EDF, and was for three years on the faculty at the University of California. His experience with object technology through the Simula language, as well as early work on abstract data types and formal specification (including participation in the first versions of the Z specification language) provided some of the background for the development of Eiffel.

At Constructor Institute he pursues research on the construction and verification of high-quality software.

He has a home page at https://se.ethz.ch/~meyer and a blog page at https://bertrandmeyer.com

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Top reviews from the United States

  • William Steinberg
    5.0 out of 5 stars Learn Eiffel by using existing libraries first
    Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    This is Bertrand Meyer's third in a series. First was Object Oriented Software Construction, then Second Edition.

    Rather than start at the beginning learning syntax, primitives, etc., you are introduced to an application to get around Paris subways. Several libraries, written in Eiffel are ready for you to exploit. The book guides you to writing several lines of Eiffel code, and voila, you are an Eiffel programmer.

    Then Meyer introduces engineering principles, and eventually the wholeness of the Eiffel Language.

    If you want to write solid Object Oriented projects and can accept an Automatic Garbage Collector (See Rust language), then Eiffel is well worth learning. Even if you don't ever find a job using it, you will understand other inferior, but popular Object Oriented languages and know their deficiencies so you can work around them. Eiffel is clean and multiple inheritance done right, as in Eiffel, has no "Diamonds of Death", just clean engineering.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Robert Maltz
    5.0 out of 5 stars Learn how to write and understand software
    Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    If you want to learn how to program and how to correctly solve problems of arbitrary scale and complexity using the computer, you must learn the material in this book (as well as in Bertrand Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Development book.) If you'd rather spend your time memorizing the myriad meaningless keystrokes needed to get and keep a job in today's software development marketplace, then go elsewhere.

    I ought to expand on the above remarks, which may seem a bit strident and extreme. But the software industry is using tools and technology barely able to cope with one-page programs. Larger scale programs either fail completely, or they are loaded with errors and do not perform as hoped. They almost never scale up to the load intended.

    Some recent wrecks, for example: Mitt Romney's wonderful election-day deployment software; and most recently, the failing Obamacare website. From the past there are wrecks all over the landscape such as the London Stock Exchange fiasco and the Iridium project.

    What other branch of engineering or science calls failures "bugs"? If a bridge or a building collapses, we don't just shrug it off as a bug. Software nowadays controls military and civilian projects of critical importance, let alone spreadsheets and word processors.

    Fortunately the technology exists to vastly improve the situation. A big step in that direction would be the widespread mastery and use of the Eiffel method and language as expounded in Bertrand Meyer's books.
    20 people found this helpful
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  • Edward C. H. Deveaux
    5.0 out of 5 stars TOUCH OF CLASS
    Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2009
    Verified Purchase
    From the man who invented eiffel. An excellent introduction to software development the right way. Examples and the software development environment is available as a free download. The approach used in this book is useful for the beginner as well as an experienced programmer. Software runs on Linux, Mac OS x,
    and Windows.
    25 people found this helpful
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  • Richard Warren
    1.0 out of 5 stars I absolutely love the book
    Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    I absolutely love the book, and only wish that Amazon's own app for Windows Phone 8.1 could display it as part of their "Read Everywhere" marketing pledge. The Amazon Kindle app (v2.0.0.7) reports an error downloading because they don't support their own Kindle book format. Granted that there's a "compatibility" drop-down on the Amazon web page, but I've never had to check that before on any of my hundreds of Kindle purchases. I will going forward, and make purchasing decisions based on their lack of support.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Luzernerli
    5.0 out of 5 stars Sehr gutes Grundlagenbuch
    Reviewed in Germany on October 14, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    Ich habe es für meinen Sohn gekauft und der ist sehr zufrieden damit. Gute und sehr genaue Beschreibungsweise. Man kann dem Text gut folgen.
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