The SIE Eiffel University Partnership Program:
Because you care about your students' careers

As computing science educators we have a responsibility to teach our students the best: skills that will land them a job and enable them to grow in that job.

Most educators know all too well the limitations of the solutions that used to work in the seventies and eighties - Pascal for introductory programming, perhaps a bit of Scheme to encourage abstract thinking, C for systems programming. The challenges of software development today demand a more modern approach.

CS and information systems departments around the world have found the solution: Eiffel. Backed by years of successful experience over four continents, Eiffel has proved to be the method of choice for universities that place teaching quality and student satisfaction at the top of their concerns.

Only with Eiffel Software Eiffel do you get:

The full benefit of object technology - from the team that wrote the book.
A simple, clear, easy to learn language. No strange syntax; forget ampersands and braces, forget complexity; to learn the concepts is to learn the notation.
Loads of high-quality libraries, giving students access to some of the best code around, both to develop their own software and to learn from the masters through the time-honored practice of apprenticeship.
Software components covering data structures, algorithms, graphics, databases, networking, Web programming, numerical computation and more.
A gentle approach to systematic software construction: Eiffel is the only environment that offers extensive assertions (preconditions, postconditions, invariants), ideal for teaching students the discipline of design by contract - ideal paradigm to train quality-conscious software developers.
The flashiest development environment around, with graphical tools, fast compilation, debugging, browsing, documentation and more.
Openness: Eiffel talks to C, to C++, to Java, so that your students learn to use the power of object technology to integrate software written on low-level approaches.
The support of a team - Eiffel Software - which understands the academic environment and enjoys working with academics for the benefit of their students.

EIFFEL: GATEWAY TO THE WORLD

With Eiffel you are not stuck within the confines of one environment. Eiffel focuses on the concepts, not on strange notational details. Countless educators have remarked how much easier it is to teach C++, Smalltalk, Java or even C once the students have mastered the techniques of modern system construction through Eiffel.

Students agree too, and so do corporate recruiters and journalists. According to Amy Cody-Quinn from Management Recruiters International, quoted in ComputerWorld: "There is a big problem with people who say they know C++ - but they don't really know how to do objects. If they have Eiffel on the résumé, then we know they really have the proper understanding of what they are doing" (in ComputerWorld, December 18, 1995).

Students with a narrow set of skills are sure to lose in today's competitive job environment. With Eiffel you build a strong basis from which students can learn all the major approaches to software construction. You equip them with the problem-solving skills that will make them able to learn new languages and tools quickly and effectively. As Steve Tynor wrote in the May, 1996 special Eiffel issue of the Journal of Object-Oriented Programming: "In Eiffel there is no long laundry list of low-level things you should and should not do... The consequence is that in Eiffel culture the problem domain becomes the central focus of concern... The programmer has more time to design for reusability, to implement the design correctly, and to ensure that both the design and the implementation properly model the domain. After all, creating systems for solving real-world problems is why we write programs in the first place." What better motto for your students?

A COMMITMENT TO EDUCATION

At Eiffel Software, we take the educational market very seriously. Never mind some of our customers develop banking systems of more than 600,000 thousands lines, such as CALFP's Rainbow system for derivative trading, on which the operation of an entire bank are based; never mind that others such as Bytex have won industry awards for intelligent hubs entirely developed in Eiffel: a first-year undergraduate course is just as important. You will enjoy the same tools, and the same support, that has won us accolades from our most demanding corporate customers.

When dealing with Eiffel Software you will be interacting with people who know about teaching and understand what dedication takes to make a software curriculum successful. You will be enjoying the benefits of the Eiffel University Partnership Program (see last page), including, together with attractive university pricing, special access to transparency masters, documentation, a mailing list of Eiffel educators, and more.

PLATFORMS

Eiffel is one of the most portable environments in the industry. You choose your platform; we provide the environment. All implementations have full source code compatibility, so that students can for example use a UNIX server at the university and continue working on their software at home.

Currently supported platforms include: Windows (95/98/Me/XP/NT/2000); OS/2; VMS (Alpha and Vax); SunOS, Solaris, HP 9000, SGI Irix, IBM RS/6000, UnixWare, Linux (a.out and ELF formats), DG Aviion etc.

TEXTBOOKS GALORE

EIFFEL-BASED TEXTBOOKS

There are plenty of textbooks to help you make your Eiffel-based course a success. Addison-Wesley has a book Series devoted to Eiffel in Practice; Prentice Hall has published some of the seminal Eiffel titles; and other publishers such as Macmillan have great titles too. Here is a sample of books, all available from Eiffel Software:

The classic: Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer now with the long-awaited second edition out. The reference on object technology and modern software engineering practices. Prentice Hall, 1997.

An Object-Oriented Introduction to Computer Science Using Eiffel by Richard Wiener, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Object-Oriented Programming. A modern CS-1 textbook using Eiffel (the companion CS-2 textbook will appear in early 1997). Prentice Hall.

Object Structures: Building Object-Oriented Software Components by Jacob Gore: a data structures and algorithms textbook utilizing the full power of Eiffel. Addison-Wesley.

Object-Oriented Software Engineering with Eiffel by Jean-Marc Jézéquel. Emphasizes the use of Eiffel for large-scale software engineering. Addison-Wesley.

Object-Oriented Programming in Eiffel by Pete Thomas and Ray Weedon (Open University, UK). A comprehensive textbook emphasizing correctness issues and abstract data types. Addison-Wesley.

Object-Oriented Programming in Eiffel by Rob Rist (University of Technology Sydney) and Robert Terwilliger (University of Colorado, Boulder). An introductory textbook with strong emphasis on design issues. Prentice Hall.

Seamless Object-Oriented Software Architecture by Kim Waldén and Jean-Marc Nerson. An analysis and design text using Eiffel-based concepts. Prentice Hall.

Eiffel: An Introduction by Robert Switzer (University of Göttingen). A concise textbook on the language and the method. Prentice Hall.

Reusable Software: The Base Object-Oriented Component Libraries by Bertrand Meyer. Presents both reusability principles and reusable components. Prentice Hall.

Many more texts are in preparation, targeting all levels of the software curriculum, from introductory programming to data structures and algorithms through software engineering, graphics and more.

STUDENT VERSIONS

Many students will want to do some of their work at home and continue exploring the ideas that they have learned at school:

The free version of EiffelStudio can be downloaded from Eiffel Software's FTP site. It offers all of the language, the environment with all of its unmatched browsing and documentation facilities, melting-ice code generation. It will run on any Windows 95 platform. And it's all for free.
The student edition adds printed manuals and the WEL library (Windows Eiffel Library) for programming graphical applications in a simple and convenient way. Current price is $69.95 and further discounts can be arranged through university bookstores.
The Linux version is also available for a very attractive price, further discounted for students whose department is a member of the Eiffel University Partnership Program.

Particularly attractive to students is the student edition of EiffelStudio which for a low price ($69.95 in the US, with even more discounts for large quantities!) offers the full power of the environment. Special deals including textbooks are available to your university bookstores; ask the bookstore manager to contact Eiffel Software for details.

WHAT EDUCATORS SAY ABOUT EIFFEL

Since 1989, hundreds of universities around the world have been using Eiffel to give their students the best. Here is some of what they have to say.

James Heliotis, Rochester Institute of Technology, introductory programming course uses Eiffel since 1994:

All of us involved in teaching the first-year courses agree that Eiffel has far exceeded our expectations... Eiffel makes it easier to take a complex software system and "open it up" slowly, piece by piece... Thanks to existing libraries full of all kinds of useful data structure, we no longer need to instruct students how to build something before they may use it. (In Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, May 1996.)

Beyond the language itself, Eiffel Software's offering is an industrial-strength, well-integrated software development environment that supports, and enforces, the use of object-oriented methods throughout.

Dan Trottier, McMaster University (Canada):

Our Department appreciates being able to offer our students quality programming environments such as Eiffel. We believe that educationally priced commercial software provides a win-win-win situation. The students win because they are more marketable, the University wins because they can offer quality environments at a reasonable cost, and industry wins because more students are familiar with their production software.

David Riley, University of Wisconsin La Crosse, first-year programming course uses Eiffel since early nineties:

We are currently using Eiffel in our very earliest programming courses. The clean syntax, small collection of primitives, static type checking, and support for design by contract make Eiffel an outstanding choice for instruction in object technology in general and object-oriented programming in particular.

Rob Rist, University of Technology, Sydney, first-year programming course uses Eiffel since 1989:

Eiffel is the only language I have ever used that makes me think harder than I want, and it has changed the way I think about system design. (From: Object-Oriented Programming with Eiffel, Prentice Hall, 1995.)

Eiffel is the best language to teach the principles of object-oriented programming. The language itself is so small and elegant that language issues are seldom a problem. This means that the real issue - design - can be brought to the front and taught explicitly. The clean and formal separation, at the routine boundary, of behaviour from implementation allows a solution to be designed at a high level, and then later implemented in code. Eiffel was created to support reuse, and it achieves what other languages only aim for. I tell my students: "If you repeat code, then your design is wrong". This is a simple rule that is almost always true, and is easily followed by students: it is easy to see repeated code. It is not so easy to fix the design, but that is where skill and expertise come in! Eiffel is so well-designed that the very structure of the language supports the design of reusable solutions

Hans-Jurgen Hoffman, Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany), program chair of the first Eiffel in Education conference (Darmstadt, May 1992):

Personally I support Eiffel in teaching for two reasons: Syntactically more related to traditional good programming style (more than Smalltalk); and based on a design methodology - design by contract - leading to very helpful constructs for program quality assurance (pre- and postconditions, object/class invariants)

David Clark, University of Canberra (Australia):

Eiffel engenders a culture of quality.

Eiffel actively "pushes" you in the right direction. My OO design / implementation subject focusses on Meyer's "external" quality factors (correctness, robustness, extendibility, reusability). The recurring question is "what can we do internally to achieve the external quality factors?" Always, what we want to do is supported

naturally by the language.

David Rine, George Mason University, using Eiffel since the early nineties for advanced courses:

We at George Mason University began using Eiffel as the language of choice for advanced object-oriented design and programming courses in 1987, particularly in the courses taken by more experienced professionals as opposed to freshman/ sophomore courses. Since then a number of our students have used Eiffel for class projects, individualized projects and doctoral dissertation tools building work. Eiffel is an excellent environment for developing business information systems. The language very nicely supports the development of information systems.

Graham Perkins, De Montfort University (UK):

A major advantage of teaching with Eiffel is that we can cover advanced design concepts from the very beginning, and in a highly practical way, due to the high level and clarity of the language. A typical OMT box can be typed in and compiled directly. The [Eiffel environment] allows smooth transitions between design and implementation and really helps eliminate the barriers between the two processes.

Another strength students appreciate is that they can learn scalable software engineering practices, rather than just the low-level coding they get in many other languages. Almost every Eiffel construct they learn has major ramifications for large scale software development. About half of the syntax is directly related to software correctness, reliability, and documentation. Lucid inheritance and generics enables us to concentrate on class design and taxonomy. By the time my software engineering students finish their Eiffel course, they are thinking about software at a much higher level and on a much larger scale than had earlier seemed possible. Instead of syntax, we had used almost all our time in discussing software design and maintenance strategies.

I was very pleased with these Software Engineering groups as they moved on to their final year projects. Instead of opting for the usual stand-alone simple "ten screens of Delphi/Access/ Visual Basic" application with hardly any functionality, they explored areas of large scale software development and designed and prototyped the relevant CASE tools".

Hector Garcia-Molina, University of Murcia (Spain):

Eiffel is the language most adequate to be used as the first object-oriented programming language, because it is a pure object-oriented language, strongly typed, simple and readable. Moreover, it combines the object-oriented concepts with characteristics which are useful for the development of large software projects, such as the assertions and exceptions mechanisms. Since 1991, we have been teaching object-oriented programming using Eiffel."

Daniel Deveaux, IUT de Vannes (France):

We teach a short C++ course after having used Eiffel to introduce object-oriented concepts¼ The message seems to get through quite well and I think we obtain a more rigorous and more conscious [student] work in C++. (Posting on the French Eiffel User Group mailing list, November 1995.)


THE EIFFEL UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM Departments having adopted Eiffel for teaching can, at no charge, join the Eiffel University Partnership Program, which includes among other advantages: The right to use transparency masters from some of Eiffel Software's most popular courses, in particular Bertrand Meyer's acclaimed Object-Oriented Software Construction seminar. A copy of An Eiffel Collection, a collection of hard-to-find articles on object technology and Eiffel. Special discount programs for students wishing to use Eiffel on their home computers. Access to Eiffel Software's customer support at the same level as commercial customers. Access to beta versions of new software releases (environment, tools, libraries¼). Participation in the Eiffel in Education mailing list.