- ISBN13: 9780596517984
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? Beautiful Architecture answers this question through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today’s leading software designers and architects. In each essay, contributors present a notable software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose.
Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specif… More >>
Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design
Tags: architects, Architecture, Beautiful, Beauty, Design, Hidden, hidden beauty, Leading, leading software, maintainable software, remainder mark, Reveal, Software, software architecture, software design, software designers, Thinkers
#1 by Olexiy Prokhorenko on March 27, 2010 - 6:32 am
The books is very solid written and covers the most recent architecture questions. Topics are well laid, very nice covered, but… too many dry and boring words about nothing. Cut it in half, leave the most interesting part (usually the shortest one, towards the end of the topic) and woo-hoo! But for some reason (or was it the strange necessity to increase book in size?!) it is talking a lot about nothing. Too much theory. I would appreciate much better the book for professionals only, no beginners, please, create a separate intro book for them. And cover only the best part for non-beginners. That would be the my “wish book”. But this one is not it yet. I was thinking about 4 stars, but 3.5 is much more appropriate, I think. Authors did a great job, anyway.
Rating: 3 / 5
#2 by Alejandro Espinoza on March 27, 2010 - 9:14 am
The book’s idea is great, but the content is not really focused. For me Architecture is not about coding. Coding is about architecture. But some of the chapters focus too much on technicalities, making it, not only out of topic, but tedious. Not all the chapters are like that, but still it makes the book a bit unfocused and too technical for the average reader.
In order to really grasp the full experience from the book you will have to have very deep and low level of knowledge of several disciplines which is unlikely (but not impossible) for the majority of the readers.
In my overall opinion the book is a worthy read, the insight from experience is great and the introduction to some very important Open Source Projects can really prove useful.
Rating: 3 / 5
#3 by Lior Bar-On on March 27, 2010 - 9:20 am
Beautiful Architecture is a collection of articles about architecture.
The books starts with a “What is architecture” article (AMAZING! almost any book about architecture has that! can’t we finally agree and deprecate this discussion?!)
Other articles arrange by topics: enterprise (server) architecture, client architecture, etc…
What really annoyed me while reading this book, and lowered two stars for it, is the repeating rhythm of the articles:
They start slow and punctuality (That’s ok), getting warmer, getting into a really interesting point and puff – suddenly the article ends.
It’s like making many preparations (warming the oven, preparing raw materials), putting the cake in, but closing it over before the cake is done. Shame!
Overall I would buy this book to get leads to new areas, not to really cover it.
Rating: 3 / 5
#4 by Amrit Tiwana on March 27, 2010 - 10:32 am
The book suffers from a “too many cooks” problem; it is a very timely book but lacks cohesion across chapters. I agree with the other reviewer that it has way too many pages about nothing. This is simply a good example of where each chapter is written by an “authority” on architecture but the chapters are disjointed and lack a consistent message. I loved the title, and idea behind the book, but it overpromises and underdelivers. But there are some redeeming features.
However, three chapters are excellent and make up for about a third of the forty dollars that I spent on this book. First, the preface and its discussion of architectural principles and properties is one of the best discussions of those topics. I have not seen that elsewhere. Chapter 1 (“what is architecture”) and chapter 2 (a contrast between a system with a messy architecture with another with a thoughtfully designed one) are excellent. Unfortunately, all this interesting content stops on page 43 and very little worth the time reading the remaining 374 pages!
I hope that the publisher would come out with a shrunk down 72 pager condensed version of this book that is more like the substance I’ve come to expect from O’Rielly books.
This book is best checked out at your local library. I would instead recommend buying Jan Bosch’s older but still unbeatable “Design and Use of Software Architectures” book.
Rating: 3 / 5