Software studies is an interdisciplinary field of research that examines digital products and their social, cultural, economic and political conditions of production from a critical cultural studies perspective from discourses of the computer age to code philologies to self- and external images of hackers and programmers. Software studies are thus complementary to approaches of the digital humanities. With these approaches, the humanities are enriched by digital, often quantitative and from computer science borrowed methods. This introductory work presents the range of current research approaches and topics for the first time.