Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer is a book written by Edward Yourdon

Edward Yourdon

Edward Nash Yourdon is an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and pioneer in the software engineering methodology...

 in 1996. It is the sequel to Decline and Fall of the American Programmer

Decline and Fall of the American Programmer

Decline and Fall of the American Programmer is a book written by Edward Yourdon in 1992. It was addressed to American programmers and software organizations of the 1990s, warning that they were about to be driven out of business by programmers in other countries who could produce software more...

. In the original, written at the beginning of the '90s, Yourdon warned American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 programmers that their business was not sustainable against foreign competition. By the middle of the decade Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 had released Windows 95

Windows 95

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...

, which marked a groundbreaking new direction for the operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

, the internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 was beginning to rise as a serious consumer marketplace, and the Java software platform had made its first public release in the same year (1995).

Due to such large changes in the state of the software industry, Yourdon reversed some of his original predictions. Notably absent from the book is any significant consideration of the open source software movement, particularly the development of the Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 kernel and the GNU

GNU

GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...

 operating system, which would come to have increasing significance in the coming decade in shaping the software industry. Both the internet, Microsoft's business strategy, and Java, which all feature significantly in Yourdon's thesis, would come to be heavily influenced by this phenomenon.

Part One: Decline & Fall Reexamined

• 1. The Original Premise
• 2. Peopleware
• 3. The Other Silver Bullets

Part Two: Repaving Cowpaths

• 4. System Dynamics
• 5. Personal Software Practices
• 6. Best Practices
• 7. Good-Enough Software

Part Three: The Brave New World

• 8. Service Systems
• 9. The Internet
• 10. Java and the New Programming Paradigm
• 11. The Microsoft Paradigm
• 12. Embedded Systems and Brave New Worlds
• 13. Past, Present, and Future