Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TomOwens 1882 days ago
I think this is why the PDF is actually the "Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge". It's not a representation of the complete body of knowledge itself, but extracting key concepts and terms and provides pointers to things that are most relevant. If things are irrelevant or disproven over time, the guide to the body of knowledge would remove those terms, concepts, or references and point to something else.
3 comments

It actually apes the Project Management Institute's terminology exactly. The PMBOK guide and the PMBOK are the same thing (as far as I know). This takes exactly the same approach. The guide is the entire book, it just has a funny name as if there was another larger book that this is a guide to. There isn't.

https://www.pmi.org/pmbok-guide-standards/foundational/pmbok

Unfortunately, where it does present "key concepts and terms", that presentation is often flawed. I think it would be more useful as a guide to the field of software engineering if that's the only thing it tried to be, setting out a well-considered structure but then referring to other reliable sources for details. It could be a lot shorter and more accessible, and it wouldn't keep saying things that are misleading or incorrect.
I'm thinking of a distinction between eg body of knowledge to mean the arrangement of muscle, skeleton and organs, versus a corpus of knowledge that you presume to be a representative collection of body parts making up a adequate whole.