Software Architecture in Practice (2nd Edition) (SEI Series in Software Engineering)

Software Architecture in Practice (2nd Edition) (SEI Series in Software Engineering) | Len Bass, Paul Clements, ... | excellent

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	Software Architecture in Practice (2nd Edition) (SEI Series in Software Engineering) Len Bass, Paul Clements, ... Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003 - 560 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Practical, readable, excellent

I found this volume to be extremely useful. It contains very insightful commentary on what architecture is (a term that I find is misused a lot), what architecture affects, and how to evaluate the qualities of an architecture.

Two of their best insights for me:

* Architecture affects the organization of the company/business unit. (In my company, we didn't realize this and we failed to create an organization that could support the architecture.)

* Virtually any architecture can accomplish the functional needs of a system - what differentiates architectures are how they provide the essential qualities (performance, modifiability, maintainibility, etc.) to the product.

The book is strongly based in the real-world, with practical examples. I never felt they were straying into "theorectical" land.

I also bought "Applied Software Architecture" but didn't like it nearly as much - I highly recommend "Software Architecture in Practice"!

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excellent

This book is my bible with regards of software architecture. In previous S.E. courses, I heard about software architecture, but the notion never quite sank on my skull; perhaps because the notion itself required a course on itself, or in this case, a book. A minor problem is that the book does not use UML; however, the diagrams the authors use are easy to understand. More importantly, I find the narrative is as good as the diagrams themselves. I almost never have to look at the diagrams to understand the notions. Tumbs up to the authors!

High density, abstract and excellent book

This book has only a few hundred pages. It took me still two months to read through it. Every sentence is loaded with information. A lot of important statements are stuffed into lists and tables. This gives the book excellent reference qualities and this makes the book quite a hard read, especially after work.

The content is relevant, clearly described and trustworthy. It has very little references to alternative views on the subject.

I am still looking for a good introductory fat book on software architecture.

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Close, but no UML

The book is basically good. SAAM is useful. However, I am at a loss to understand why the authors have chosen to totally ignore UML, which is (and was at the time of publication) the de facto standard for representing software architecture. They have instead represented architectures in their own non-standard, which the reader is forced to learn to understand their diagrams.

UML is now as fundamental a piece of knowledge to the software architect as schematics are to the electrical engineer, and for the same reason - it is a common language of discourse, and is supported by the available tools. I urge the authors to publish a second edition with UML substituted for the ad-hoc diagrams.

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"In Practice" are the key words

SAIP gave some useful insights into how to apply the most practical aspects of software architecture to projects. Rather than dwelling on the "pie in the sky" theories that are so abundant (but which are usually completely impractical in a company which needs revenue to survive), the authors give good practices to meet both architectural quality, and practical goals. They also give some fairly illustrative examples.

What I didn't like about the book was that it doesn't present a complete approach to developing a software architecture. It outlines many different pieces of the puzzle of architecting, but doesn't do a good job of putting the complete puzzle together for the reader.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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