General Principles of Systems Design

by Gerald M. Weinberg, Daniela Weinberg

Partial Contents1: The Problem of PersistenceWeinberg's Law(s) of Twins - The General Systems Approach to Continuity2: AggregatesBirths and Deaths--The Fundamental Aggregate Equation3: Birth-Free AggregatesSocial Versus Innate Survival - Exponential Decay - Unimodal Life Tables, and Ogives4: Reasoning About AggregatesCooperation and Competition--The Law of Collapse - The Law of Typology5: Modeling Differentiated AggregatesThe State Vector - Constructing a System of Equations - To Solve or Not To Solve?6: Programs for Models of Differentiated AggregatesVarieties of Programs - Transitive Closure--The Diagram of Possible Effects7: Structure and BehaviorThe Structure of Structure - Projecting Behavior with a Linear Program8: The Structure-Regulation LawThe Equivalence of Structure and Input - Can a Linear System Be Stable?9: The Search for RegulationThe Problem of Multidimensional Regulation - Separation of Variables10: The Homeostatic HeuristicsThe Internal Environment - Identifying and Essential Variables11: Other Regulatory HeuristicsThe Feedback Principle - Analyzing Feedback Loops - The Piddling Principle12: Types of Regulatory MechanismsConditional and Unconditional Mechanisms - Error-Control - Anticipation13: Regulation and EnvironmentActing on the Environment - The Environment Regulation Laws - The Regulatory Model - The Game of Regulation14: When the Model FailsThe Fundamental Regulator Paradox - Noise - Noise in Communication Systems15: Making Regulation MysteriousThe Impression of Intelligence - The Myth of Superiority16: Overly Simple Views of RegulationThe Kool-Aid Fallacy and the Aspirin Illusion - The False-Alarm Fallacy - Flareback17: Blindness and Reversed VisionHiddenReverses - Denying the Existence of Regulation18: Epilogue

Genres: Nonfiction, Design, Computer Science, Technology

376 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1988

About the author

Gerald Marvin Weinberg (October 27, 1933 – August 7, 2018) was an American computer scientist, author and teacher of the psychology and anthropology of computer software development.

Reviews

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as good as the author's "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking". If you already have some experience with complex system simulation/regulation, you will not learn that much here. Still, it's a really good book. I just may have set my expectations too high due to the previously mentioned intro book.