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Newsgroups: comp.specification
Subject: Re: recommended texts
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References: <34462@news.Think.COM> <10964@june.cs.washington.edu>
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Reply-To: cliff@ipse2pt5.UUCP (Cliff Jones)
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RE: I read somewhere ...

Jon Jacky is correct, I have just produced a revised version. Info is:

@book{Jones90a,
	author	    =	"C. B. Jones",
	title	    =	"Systematic Software Development using VDM",
	edition =	{Second},
	publisher   =	"Prentice Hall International",
	year	    =	"1990",
	note =		"ISBN 13-880733-7"
}

There is a companion "Case Study book":

@book{JonesShaw90,
	title =		"Case Studies in Systematic Software Development",
	editor =	"C.B. Jones and R.C.F. Shaw",
	publisher =	"Prentice Hall International",
	year =		"1990",
	note =		"ISBN 13-116088-5


}


A few words of explanation:

New Books on VDM

You may previously have seen "Systematic Software Development using
VDM". This note explains its revised form and a new book of case
studies. Both are available now from Prentice Hall.

The BSI (British Standards Institution) committee on VDM has made
significant progress towards a BSI-VDM standard and this has provided
an incentive to revise my 1986 book.  It has also made it worth collecting
some medium-sized case studies and producing two books in a uniform style.

The case studies book ("Case Studies in Systematic Software Development" -
edited by Jones and Shaw) collects together 12 different applications
written by 10 authors.  The examples include two database like systems, a
machine architecture, unification, user interface description and garbage
collection as well as two language descriptions (one covering object-oriented
features).

I believe that this book can provide the bridge from the "finger exercises" 
which fit in a text book to the larger tasks that students might face in
industrial applications.  In the intensive industry courses which I have
prepared, we have always waded into a significant case study.  I believe
that this approach should also be used in tertiary education (but recognise
the problems of fitting it into the exams structure).

I hope the availability of the Jones/Shaw book will overcome one of the 
limitations of my 1986 book.  I have also studied feedback from many people
in planning revisions to the textbook itself.
Apart from the syntactic changes,
I hope that the other visual impact will come from the improved typesetting
and layout.  (We now have LaTeX "bsivdm" macros and have produced output on 
a high-resolution Linotron printer.)  I have used a clearer way of bringing 
definitions into proofs and believe this has simplified one of the aspects of 
my earlier book which was hardest to teach.  The original material on 
operation decomposition was unclear and Chapter 10 has been completely
rewritten.
A new Chapter 11 presents a mini-casestudy so as to tie together all parts of
the specification and development method.

The use of BSI-VDM is emphasised by an appendix giving its concrete syntax
(the LaTeX macros actually make it easy to change syntax; it would - for
example - be straightforward to redefine things to produce output in the
limited ASCII syntax).  A host of minor corrections and improvements have also 
been incorporated in the second edition.

I am currently revising the "Teacher's Notes" and these will be available in
Spring 1990.  This time, they will be distributed from PHI.

Cliff Jones