
Ask HN: Is reading ASPD by liskov and guttag worth it in 2019? - alexgiorev
In my question ASPD stands for &quot;Abstraction and Specification in Program Development&quot;.<p>I am certain there are ideas in that book which are still relevant today, but since I am self learning, I am afraid I won&#x27;t be able to discern the good ideas from the outdated ones. Is it worth my time to read the book if:<p>- i am a beginning programmer<p>- i have already read SICP (which covers some of the same topics, like procedural abstraction, data abstraction...)<p>Thanks for your time.
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hackermailman
The course notes here are a full textbook and cover some of the same topic
[https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2018sp/](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2018sp/)
(see lecture 9) the ideas are the same, though ASPD uses CLU as a lang example
you can adopt the ideas to any spec. I still read 1980s programming texts,
such as the Unix Programming Environment which taught me awk and sh scripts.
You could also look up that book on google scholar to follow the citations
(800+) and change the results year to find modern papers/books on the same
subject.

Matthias of Little Schemer author fame also has a course in software
development covering specs
[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/4500-f18/2.md](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/4500-f18/2.md)
or any school
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/15313/2018/index.html#sched...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/15313/2018/index.html#schedule)

