Title: The Program Design INSTRUCTOR
Author: Rui Bivar de Oliveira
Publisher: BookSurge.com in association with MigrationWare
Publication Date: July 2007

The Program Design Instructor - essentials for programmer productivity

Designing solutions to tasks performed by programs is perhaps the most challenging and interesting aspect of programming. Experienced programmers, treading a path they know well, may decide to bypass the design step and yet arrive at a good solution to the problem. The reason for this is that experience has already provided a solution. The drawback to this approach is that, most probably, somebody else will be maintaining the program, and for that person it would be most convenient to find a graphic representation of what the program does – this saves time.

The Program Design Instructor, Rui de Oliveira’s new book due for publication later this year, is primarily directed at those programmers who tackle solutions to business problems. Solutions are presented to many types of problems encountered in a business environment. Once the reader is comfortable with a particular solution, the approach which is now understood can be used in the solution to other problems.

Although the book uses COBOL to exemplify solutions, it is not difficult to apply the solutions to other languages. Similarly, though the examples are associated with procedural programming, understanding how to solve problems will have applicability to the solution of problems in an object oriented environment.

When using an OO approach we start by looking for the classes required by the solution to the problem. Eventually we will arrive at the point where programs will do work. In procedural programming, we use functional decomposition in arriving at the solution. Notice however, says the author, that whatever the approach used, there comes a time when we must resolve how the work the program is to do will be implemented. It is here that the activity of the procedural programmer and that of the OO programmer coincide, so it is here that both need to be aware of the techniques available to facilitate the design of the solution.

THE AUTHOR: Rui de Oliveira spent more than 30 years in computer programming in industry, training and education. A former IBM branch manager, he transferred his passion into education and founded one of South Africa's best known training schools, the Luso Computer Institute. Latterly engaged in courseware development he is currently completing other student friendly books on C, C++ & C++.NET, C# and VB.NET.