Customer Reviews

Patterns for Fault Tolerant Software (Wiley Software Patterns Series)

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The book in its first edition is still immature: The content is not well structured; too many references break the reading flow; sections are not preceded with a section title, nor are the different sections explained.

The patterns presented are more of recipes or good practices than patterns as understood by GoF (Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)) or POSA series (Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 1: A System of Patterns). The proposed solutions lack detail (e.g. "SOFTWARE UPDATE": it is not explained how to implement it), and there is no implementation tips.

It would be convenient adding more diagrams (preferably UML diagrams) to clarify relations between patterns (e.g. "FAULT OBSERVER" - "SOMEONE IN CHARGE" - "WATCHDOG" - "SYSTEM MONITOR"). This lack of diagrams makes more difficult trying to understand differences between the so-called "patterns".

The book is full of very simple pictures that are completely useless for understanding the patterns (some of them are really silly - it would be fine if they were placed in the margin, for example, but it's very annoying interrupting the text with these pictures and trying to force an explanatory text). The pictures could help remembering the stuff, but they are also referenced during the text, and these references break the reading flow.

The book contains some minor errors (e.g. the reference [DRS00] in the text refers to RFC 2278, when it should refer to RFC 2778).

Good point: last conclusion chapter provides a better picture of the "patterns" described in the book than any other chapter. From my point of view, is only after reading this chapter when the book makes sense.

As a conclusion, I found it interesting because it provides a common language for fault tolerant issues. It's useful as introductory material, but it needs some work, and I won't consider it a must-have book.

I used Bob's book "Patterns for Fault Tolerant Software" as reading material for my "Advanced Patterns and Frameworks" course. My students and me liked it very much. Not only is fault tolerance a domain not well covered by a typical informatics bachelor's program but also the writing style and presentation of the patterns in "Alexandrian form" made the patterns easy to read and follow. In contrast to the sole other reviewer, my students could cope with the networked structure of the pattern language easily and the diagrams visualizing the interconnection helped greatly to follow the interdependence of the patterns.

Each week the students prepared a section or a group of patterns and explained and discussed the patterns as a group in front of other student groups that had to prepare other pattern books. Not only the students actually reading Bob's book, but also the students from the other groups got a great overview on the domain of fault tolerance. They often could relate the patterns from the book to their own experience and knowledge gained in other courses, i.e., on computer networks, and thus strengthen their understanding in both areas.

From a pattern perspective, I liked the "Alexandrian" approach as performed by Bob Hanmer very much, because in contrast to my own pattern writing style it suits better for "smaller" and interconnected patterns forming a pattern language. The pictures and visuals help a lot in memorizing and understanding the concepts behind the individual patterns.