I surveyed Software Engineering texts and found they fell into two
general categories:
  * pragmatic books on practice for programmers
  * academic discussions of research and history

The former are quite valuable, and I make extensive use 
of one (I like McConnell's "Code Complete").  But this
book, while excellent, is (IMHO) insufficient.  It talks
about practice, but not principles ... and a University
level course in Software Engineering should go beyond
contemporary dogma and explore the issues and principles 
to which current practices attempt to respond.

There are many books of the second type, but (to my taste)
they tended towards surveys of academic work rather than
philosophical or practical discussions of problems and 
approaches.  Fortunately this is a field where a great many
smart people regularly confront the same problems, and so
there are many excellent columns and articles on Software
Engineering problems and approaches.  I tried to base my 
theory reading on such sources.  Here I found that while 
there were many good papers on issues and particular approaches 
... it was difficult to find reasonable pedagogical articles 
on basic concepts (often required as foundation for the 
issue discussions). 

The obvious place to look for such articles is the Wikipedia,
and I found a few good ones, and where I found weaknesses, I
contributed to a few.  But in many cases the articles were 
academic surveys rather than basic pedagogy, and the changes
I would have wanted to see would have pulled those articles
so far off axis that I surely would have offended other
(skilled and generous) contributors ... and a grand 
unification would involve more time and energy than I was
prepared to put in.

Thus it came to pass that I decided to write my own 
introductory articles on subjects where I could not 
find a reasonable introduction.
I don't claim to be among the great writers or theologians in 
Software Engineering, but basic concepts aren't rocket science,
and I think these are at least as good as the coverages I have
seen in several texts ... and so a good start.

Everything in this directory is my own creation, and anyone
who can make good use of it is welcome to do so.  If anyone
would like to improve on this material or has a suggestion for
how it can be used as part of some greater open source text
effort, gladly will I accept, and gladly share.

regards,
	Mark Kampe
	mark.kampe@gmail.com