Software Architecture PatternsSoftware Architecture Patterns by Mark Richards

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dear Readers!

This time I’m presenting a short review of a very short book. It is about a very important topic, namely software architecture. Please enjoy.

I picked this book up because it was offered as a free download by O’Reilly as I was visiting their webpage and since it’s not long at all (not even 50 pages), I thought it would be a nice quick read for a weekend evening. Let’s see what it has in store.

The book starts out with a short single page introduction on software architecture, where the author basically discusses the importance of such concepts, then switches immediately to present 5 commonly used software architectures. Each architecture has its own dedicated chapter, where with the help of a few simple figures, the author describes them in a short and easy to understand manner, then continues with some recommendations and topics of considerations for choosing or discarding them. Each pattern is finally analyzed from several points of view, like agility, performance, testability, etc. and are given scores for easy comparison.

Generally there isn’t much to say about the book, as it is very targeted and very short, so above from the most necessary thoughts there isn’t much else. The topics are well chosen and the discussions are well executed. But I was hard pushed to say something anyway, I’d say that I liked the fact that non of the patterns is treated as the being better than the other, but instead each is given fair credit. If I had to complain about something than it would be the amount and scope of examples (small and limited), but it is hardly a complain as the book is hardly long enough to include a lot of examples. So all in all, I would recommend this to everyone interested in software craftsmanship, as it costs literally nothing, and it requires almost no time at all to read from cover to cover.

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