6.005 Software Construction

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MIT’s 6.005 Software Construction is an undergraduate course focused on the engineering principles needed to build software that is safe from bugs, easy to understand, and easy to change. Rather than concentrating mainly on programming syntax, it teaches disciplined software development through specifications and invariants, testing and test-case design, code review, version control, abstraction, abstract data types, representation independence, object-oriented design, recursion, grammars and parsing, concurrency, networking, and functional programming. The course uses Java extensively and includes readings, programming exercises, problem sets, quizzes, and a larger team project. 

A central theme is that good software comes from careful reasoning and continuous feedback, not simply from writing code that appears to work. Students learn to specify precisely what a program should do, design tests systematically, control mutable state, reason about abstractions and representation invariants, and prevent concurrency problems such as races and deadlocks.

 The practical assignments progress from relatively small exercises such as Turtle Graphics and Tweet Tweet to larger projects such as Multiplayer Minesweeper and an ABC Music Player, giving students repeated opportunities to apply the principles in realistic software development.

COURSE