Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer

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Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer
Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.jpg
First edition
AuthorEdward Yourdon
CountryUnited States
PublisherPrentice Hall
Publication date
1996
Media typePrint
ISBNISBN:978-0-13-956160-3
OCLC37457822
005.1 21
LC ClassQA76.6 .Y6682 1998
Preceded byDecline and Fall of the American Programmer 

Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer is a book written by Edward Yourdon in 1996. It is the sequel to Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. In the original, written at the beginning of the '90s, Yourdon warned American programmers that their business was not sustainable against foreign competition. By the middle of the decade Microsoft had released Windows 95, which marked a groundbreaking new direction for the operating system, the internet was beginning to rise as a serious consumer marketplace, and the Java software platform had made its first public release.

Due to such large changes in the state of the software industry, Yourdon reversed some of his original predictions. Notably absent from the book is any significant consideration of the open source software movement, particularly the development of the Linux kernel and the GNU operating system, which would come to have increasing significance in the coming decade in shaping the software industry. Both the internet, Microsoft's business strategy, and Java, which all feature significantly in Yourdon's thesis, would come to be heavily influenced by this phenomenon.

Chapter Outline

Part One: Decline & Fall Reexamined

  • 1. The Original Premise
  • 2. Peopleware
  • 3. The Other Silver Bullets

Part Two: Repaving Cowpaths

  • 4. System Dynamics
  • 5. Personal Software Practices
  • 6. Best Practices
  • 7. Good-Enough Software

Part Three: The Brave New World

  • 8. Service Systems
  • 9. The Internet
  • 10. Java and the New Programming Paradigm
  • 11. The Microsoft Paradigm
  • 12. Embedded Systems and Brave New Worlds
  • 13. Past, Present, and Future

Appendix: An Updated Programmer's Bookshelf