There's an age-old conundrum for professors of all disciplines: you're about to teach a course in your field, but you can't find a textbook that you like. If you're like John Dooley, William and Marilyn Ingersoll Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, the solution is simple—write it yourself.

Dooley's latest book is entitled Software Development, Design and Coding: With Patterns, Debugging, Unit Testing, and Refactoring. The book first began in 2004, when the Computer Science department decided to include a course on software development. Without a solid textbook to drawn on, Dooley started teaching it using a combination of primary sources, articles, and his own notes. He compiled notes during sabbatical in 2010, and the first edition was published the following year.

Still, a textbook doesn't last forever. "Six years later, lots of things in software development had changed, so when I retired it seemed like a good time to update the book." Dooley says he worked on it chapter by chapter, allowing him to focus on the best way to present each individual section.

The book highlights new techniques and project management methods that have come out since the first edition. As a lifelong programmer (he's been writing code for 45 years!) Dooley is always interested in developments in technology: "I'm excited about new tools and languages that make writing complicated software easier [as well as] techniques that give more ownership to the developers."

Dooley has published five books, with another to appear in 2018. Several are historical accounts of cryptography and the uses of ciphers for military intelligence. Dooley attributes his work ethic to his experience in the industry, saying that it allowed him to "concentrate on the writing part." In terms of his career as an author, however, there was one particularly formative experience: "my undergraduate liberal arts degree helped make me a better writer!"