Written by internationally renowned experts in programming methodology, this book explains how to build high-quality production programs, that is, programs that are reliable and easy to maintain and modify.

The book emphasizes modular programming: how to properly structure individual modules and how to organize a program as a collection of modules.

The methodology is effective for both independent programmers, who build a small program or a module for a larger one, and software engineers who are members of a development team for a complex program consisting of multiple modules. In both cases, the methodology of the book provides a solid foundation for designing object-oriented programs and implementing software in a modular way.

Since each module of the program corresponds to an abstraction, such as a collection of documents or a process that searches for specific documents in the collection, the book first explains the most useful types of abstractions: procedural abstractions, iteration abstractions, and, most importantly, data abstractions. In fact, the authors treat data abstraction as a fundamental pattern for designing and implementing object-oriented programs.

The book, with numerous examples, also shows how to develop specifications that define these abstractions - specifications that describe what a module does - and then analyzes ways to implement the modules to do what they are supposed to do with acceptable performance.

The programming language used in the book's examples is Java. However, the techniques presented are independent of programming languages, and you will also find an introduction to the basic concepts of Java for programmers who are not familiar with this language.