Customer Reviews

Domain-Specific Languages (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As usual, Fowler delivers a very well structured book, easy to both read and use as reference material. He is a very able and pragmatic writer and that shows in this book.

However, I can't consider this book a good text because of the things it omits. This is a book about designing DSLs and this task is one of the things functional languages excel at, but Fowler establishes in the introduction that he is going to happily ignore all things related to functional programming and never looks back. Anyone interested in designing DSLs owes it to himself to research Haskell, Scala and F# as they are vastly superior to Java in this respect.

Fowler has been one of the best at writing about OO design and approaches this book in the same way, sadly he hasn't upgraded his knowledge to include other paradigms that in this case address the problem at hand better.

The Kindle edition seems okay to me: hyperlinks work, there's a good table of contents, and the diagrams and code samples render fine. You cannot copy and paste code from the Kindle version - by design. Style is a occasionally self-conscious and discursive, you know - the regular grey-haired guru affectation. It's long, but not exactly terse or concise. But there are some rich veins of tremendously precious material in this book. It's accessible too. I am getting a lot of value from it without a comp sci background. A bargain.

This excellent information in the book is locked behind a lazy kindle conversion. References within the book are not hyper-lined, and, much worse, reference page numbers of the physical edition instead of kindle "locations," making them extra useless. All for a price approaching the physical edition.

Fowler wrote a beautiful, humorous and accessible introduction to the extremely rich field of domain specific languages. I could immediately put the knowledge into quite impressive action on a little project. Thank you for that.

After a general introduction in the first part (143 pages) more detailed knowledge can be found in another five parts. Those parts are written in a pattern style. This leads to advantages for systematic comparison and reference type usage. Actually reading through the quite heavy book from cover to cover lets one suffer a little from the high amount of redundancy.

I do like the deep thinking and clear style of Martin Fowler. Fowler has an independent and great mind: Fowler does not hesitate to make style recommendations for DSLs that are opposite to a good style within a normal programming language.

The examples are easily accessible. The languages are mostly Java, C# and Ruby.

I do highly recommend this thorough introduction to a very different approach to programming.

I no longer write programs, I help people design systems, through sensible design and architecture, but I have never forgotten my assembler roots. The author has produced an important book, as significant as when he created the refactoring book and analysis patterns, and for the same reason.
Fowler took concepts that good professionals understand almost implicitly by working through these difficult ideas and places them in context that can be used as a communication tool. He has put a name and a face to a set of memes.
Fowlers critical examination of the importance of the semantic model and the way it needs to be constructed apart from syntax, the separation of the state machine model, and the illustrative programming ideas as exemplified by spreadsheets, provide PERSPECTIVE that is so sorely needed. He links these concepts together in a way that is vital for architects and programmers.

Good stuff with many exapmples. It is also a big book with many chapters. Based on my reading, it took about 2 years to write but it is not easy to digest in a short period of time. It would require some time to study the good research and material in the book. Another intresting aspect is the historical perspective of domain sepcific languages. This is not a new concept but the book introduces new approaches to promote the almost forgotten topic. The only issue that you must be aware of, is that you must have programming hands on knowledge if you want to understand it.

Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parson's DOMAIN-SPECIFIC LANGUAGES is also a pick for any software engineering holding. It comes from a noted software development expert who provides the basics software pros need to decide when and how to utilize DSLs. From a general survey of the basic general principles to technical details for developers involved in implementation, this is a fine pick for any college-level lending library.

I need to respectfully disagree with the earlier reviewer who criticized the Kindle edition. I am finding the conversion job to be excellent, and the links to work quite well. Perhaps Amazon improved it after that bad review.

I'm finding links everywhere I need them. It's far better than the paper edition which doesn't have any hyperlinks (you have to manually flip paper, how 20th century). Compared to paper, the Kindle edition is easier to navigate, cost less, and was delivered instantly. I am reading it on my Kindle PC Reader, as I don't own an actualy Kindle device yet.

And it's not a bad computer book either

I really enjoyed reading Domain-Specific Languages. The three largest things I got from the book were:
- Where to look when I needed to understand a technique I hadn't previously used
- Where to point people when they wanted more information on a technique I was using
- Remember to use techniques that I've been successful with in the past

This is definitely a must get for anyone interested in understanding and applying the ideas behind Domain-Specific Languages.

This book seemed interesting until I relized how many CODE examples are in this book. Fowler seems to pack way to much CODE in his books, I'd be just as educated if I were to skim through a subversion repository. Next time cut the code and publish the meat, a reference to your many wonderful examples of Thoughtworks code will do. P.S this will leave room for you to market your warez