Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Excellent book, Very useful reference

Rather than being a boring book , Beautiful Architecture, is a well-written and very informative collection of interesting example from real life that should be known by anyone with interest in this field. Even if the systems presented in the book are on different platforms, using totally different technologies, and developed in different periods of time, all share some important aspects related to the architecture.

The book is divided in five parts. The first part is a general presentation on what is an architecture and an example of two software systems, very similar from many aspects like size, appliance, programming language, operating system and even so, one was aborted and one is used in our days. The first one was abandoned mainly because the lake of the design from the binging, hard to add new features, and the amount of effort required to rework, refactor, and correct the problems with the code structure had become prohibitive. The second one, is still in production, still being extended and changed daily. The actual architecture for the second one it is remarkably similar to the original design, with a few notable changes, and a lot more experience to prove the design was right.

The second part is about the "Enterprise Application Architecture". In this part is 4 systems are presented: the scaling problem faced in case of a massively multiplayer online games, the grow of a system for image storage and retrieval for retail offerings of portraits, an example resource-oriented system in which is presented the importance of Web Services in an enterprise application, and in the last chapter the Facebook application system is presented, and how the Facebook Platform was created.

Part three is about System Architecture. It starts by presenting the Xen virtualization platform that has grown from an academic research effort to major open source project. A large part of its success is due to it being released as open source. Then a fault tolerance system is presented, by reviewing the Tandem Operating System designed between 1974 and 1976 and shipped between 1976 and 1982. Chapter nine presents JPC, an x86 PC Emulator in Pure Java. Another Java implementation is presented in chapter ten: Jikes RVM is a successful research virtual machine, providing performance close to the state-of-the-art in a flexible and easy-to-extend manner.

In the fourth part, the End-User Application Architectures are presented. The GNU Emacs text editor architecture is described, and also a comparison with other software like Eclipse and Firefox is provided. Then the KDE project, one of the biggest Free Software, is presented in chapter twelve.

Languages and Architecture are presented in the last part of the book. This parts starts with a comparison between functional and object-oriented programming, continue with some examples of object-oriented programming and ends with some thoughts on beautiful buildings with problems.

From the beginning of a project is very important to have a clear view of the architecture and technologies used, because after some iterations is really hard, or in some situation impossible, to change the entire architectures and in some cases ignoring the architecture can lead to a project fail. A good conclusion for the book would be that: "An architecture influences almost everything that comes into contact with it, determining the health of the codebase and also the health of the surrounding areas."

I got a chance to review one of the books in OReilly's "Beautiful" series, in this case it was Beautiful Architecture.
One of the attractions of the books in this series, is the premise that you get to hear first-hand accounts, in an essay format, from the people behind some of the more interesting projects out there. So the book can be viewed as an opportunity to ask a bunch of innovative technologists the question: how did you build it?

On the back cover the book claims that the contributors cover notable and innovative software architectures. At first glance the table of contents looked pretty promising, for example "The architecture of the Facebook platform". However, after spending some time with the book and reading through 5 random chapters, it feels like there is just not enough substance for the book to achieve what most people are probably hoping to get out of the book: concrete blueprints or solid design patterns to build systems demonstrating desired characteristics.

For the first 45 or pages of the book, the essays tended to meander around the topics of general definition of architecture vs software design etc, and general experience of people working on some non-trivial projects. But somehow the conversation always feels more academic than practical. So you kind of feel like you are sitting on a plane waiting for it to disengage from the gate and move towards the tarmac. And given the fact that this book is supposed to be about "beautiful" architectures, I am not at all sure why we need to spend time reading about "The Messy Metropolis". Given the title and general back cover description of the book I was expecting the narratives to be more specific and more parallels drawn with real-world systems that people interested in this book could be building.

The chapter "Architecting for Scale" by Jim Waldo, was also a bit underwhelming. We basically get a pretty high level overview of a system that was never really tested in the field, was not thoroughly bench-marked, and is addressing a fairly narrow problem domain of online gaming. Although some interesting ideas are presented, you have a hard time agreeing that this is necessarily beautiful because it does not seem that the system is proven to successfully solve their scalability goals. The chapter about facebook platform also failed to describe the thinking process and design trade-offs, you get a description of general building blocks but you don't really get any aha moments.

I did enjoy "Software Architecture: Object-Oriented versus Functional" by Bertrand Meyer, however one might argue that the book might have been better off focusing on systems architecture and concrete examples of real-world projects as opposed to discussion of type systems and other programming language esoterica, especially when the Meyer makes it clear that he has not actually worked in finance nor released production systems dealing with financial contracts.

I think this book is decent read on your e-book reader, but if you have limited bookshelf space and want to keep it filled with true classics, this book is not it.

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.