Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design

by Diomidis Spinellis, Georgios Gousios

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
ISBN: 059651798X

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Book 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 specific project, including decisions they faced and tradeoffs they made. Others take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have influenced computing as a whole. With this book, you'll discover:

• How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem
• The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolve
• How community processes within the Kde project help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems
• How creeping featurism has helped Gnu Emacs gain unanticipated functionality
• The magic behind the Jikes Rvm self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime
• Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the choice platform in high-availability environments for over two decades
• Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural views How architectures can affect the software's evolution and the developers' engagement
• Go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the way you approach your own projects, with Beautiful Architecture.

Customer Reviews

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.