Stephan Diehl is a full professor for computer science at the University of Trier, Germany. His research interests include programming languages and compiler design, web technologies, educational software and visualization, in particular software visualization. He teaches courses on software visualization at university as well as in industry and has been heavily involved in various international software visualization related events.

Software visualization encompasses the development and evaluation of methods for graphically representing different aspects of software, including its structure, its execution, and its evolution. Software visualization combines techniques from areas like software engineering, programming languages, data mining, computer graphics, information visualization and human-computer interaction.

Here is an ideal textbook on software visualization, written especially for students and teachers in computer science. It provides a broad and systematic overview of the area including many pointers to tools available today. Topics covered include static program visualization, algorithm animation, visual debugging, as well as the visualization of the evolution of software. The author's presentation emphasizes common principles and provides different examples mostly taken from seminal work. In addition, each chapter is followed by a list of exercises including both pen-and-paper exercises as well as programming tasks.