The story of software engineering has been the story of increasing the level of abstraction at which we as programmers work, from logic encoded in hardware to toggle switches representing binary digits, through machine code, assembly language, low-level languages, and high-level languages both procedural and functional. More recently,...

A FEW YEARS AGO some students and I were looking at a map that pinpointed the locations of about loo cities. We asked ourselves, "Which of these cities are neighbors of each other?" We knew intuitively that some pairs of cities were neighbors and others were not; we wanted to find a formal mathematical characterization that...

This book is about the use of techniques and tools for the design and implementation of computer systems and software that are free from logical or functional flaws (in the sense of functional requirements). The word rigorous in the title of this book is justified by the fact that the arguments for such fault freeness have their roots...

This book is complete: my checklists and FileMaker databases have cross-indexed features, preferences, and the applications that ship with Mac OS X, to make certain that everything shows up somewhere in the book. It has been revised against the second update—Mac OS X 10.0.2. We have tried to include screen shots of almost every feature,...

Operating systems are an essential part of any computer system. Similarly, a course on operating systems is an essential part of any computer-science education. This field is undergoing rapid change, as computers are now prevalent in virtually every application, from games for children through the most sophisticated planning tools for...

This book is not intended to be a traditional software engineering text — there are many good ones. Instead, it is designed specifically for those involved in image processing systems. It provides a modern engineering framework for the specification, design, coding, testing, and maintenance of image processing software and...

This is a book for business analysts about modeling. A model is a simplified representation of a situation or problem, and modeling is the process of building, refining, and analyzing that representation for greater insight and improved decision making. Some models are so common that they are thought of as routine instruments rather...

We are all familiar with the time-honored idea of a Virtual Machine that is neutral with respect to computer architecture and can be used to execute a high-level language, after its translation to the VM byte-code. This approach can be found in several successful mono-language systems, that support popular languages such as Java or...

Concurrent processes can exhibit extremely complicated behavior, and neither informal reasoning nor testing is reliable enough to establish their correctness. In this thesis, we develop a new technique for the verification of parallel programs. The technique is stated in terms of axioms and inference rules, and it is used to prove...

The IBM Vienna Laboratory has made a significant contribution to the work on the semantic description of computer systems. Both the operational semantics descriptions ("VDL") and the later work on denotational semantics ("Meta-IV", "VEM") contain interesting scientific ideas. Partly because of the large...

Different kinds of objects containing data are found on the Internet, including structured (e.g., relational) databases, collections of documents, and search engines. On the one hand, creating, storing, manipulating, and retrieving Internet documents can benefit from techniques known from the databases and data modeling...