Customer Reviews

A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I purchased this book because Scott Ambler was listed as a coauthor. What I received is a book that is uneven in editing and content, and next to worthless as a "Practical Guide". There are some areas in the book that are worthwhile, but on the whole this book is out of touch with contemporary practices in enterprise architecture and how to approach it.

My advice is to avoid this book. A more realistic, realworld and practical approach to architecture can be found in "IT Architecture Toolkit" by Jane A. Carbone, ISBN 0131473794.

What a disjointed collection of material. Did they even talk about Enterprise Architecture? No! This was my first book about Enterprise Architecture and it was so confusing on how it was written. Terrible. Don't get this one.

This is the worst IT book I have ever read. A collection of rambling unrelated raves. There is about 2 pages mentioning Enterprise Architecture. Scott Ambler uses the book to sell his EUP approach but makes sure he gives nothing away, so one is forced to buy his book...

The book is full of diagrams that are not even discussed in the text...just there to fill in the pages.

A waste of space

book does not discuss enterprise architecture -- doesn't cover some of the methods, frameworks, and the purpose for EA. Doesn't even give a definition of what EA is. Contains several disjointed chapters with topics that are remotely related to EA but does not even begin to tie together or address the queston "what is EA?" You can do better with free online resources.

I picked this book up at a local bookstore and quickly returned
it. The fact that it is a "collaboration" between several authors
contributes to the disjointed flow between chapters. It is more
like a collection of small essays than a concise book on EA.

You'd be better off finding another book on RUP (Rational Unified
Process). The treatment in this book is incomplete and will leave
the beginner confused. I found the editing to be substandard---but
perhaps the editor had no experience with RUP and those issues
slid on by.

You might want to find another source for RUP information.

... Caveat emptor.

About 4 pages of this book concern Zachman. The rest of the book largely avoids any enterprise architecture topic.

The confused authors, and some reviewers here, do not understand the difference between enterprise architecture and software architecture.

The title of this book mimics the very popular PDF document "A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture", written for government EA practice. It may seem odd, but US government practice is at the forefront of EA because the organizations are huge and the IT budgets massive. Look for this PDF file on the CIO council website or www.egov.gov. This begs the question of if the authors wanted to steal from the popularity of the earlier work and take advantage of those without a deep knowledge of EA- such as most programmers.

Missing from the book are things like TOGAF, FEAF, DODAF. Also missing is the practical list of artifacts in Scott Bernard's EA3 book. Come to think of it, get Scott's book, DODAF vol 1 & 2, the PDFs at www.egov.gov under the EA link, FEAF v 1.1 (PDF) and you will be far ahead of this confused mishmash of OO religion and EA misinformation.

I've been doing this for about 20 years, so I may be entitled to an opinion.

This is one of the few books available that attempts to make sense of enterprise architecture (as opposed to the software architecture for individual information systems). It sets out to be a guide to the main themes in the field and largely succeeds in this aim.

The book provides well written, practical, accessible overviews of a number of topics important to enterprise architecture, including infrastructure architecture, software architecture, service oriented architecture, data architecture, product line architecture and architecture for the presentation tier, as well as a set of extensions to RUP (known as "EUP" - see http://www.enterpriseunifiedprocess.info) and sets of practices to help make architecture and modelling "agile".

There's a lot here of value and the book is one that's easy to recommend to those interested in developing into the role of enterprise architect.

The limitations of the book are probably inevitable, given its fundamental form (covering a wide range of topics and being written by six authors) but it does have some.

Each of the subjects covered is described in a single chapter, leading to a relatively shallow degree of explanation and you're often left with a lot of questions - particularly how to apply this knowledge. Having said this, the text provides plenty of suggestions for further reading to address this problem.

The wide range of subjects also leads to a certain degree of fragmentation, and the book could do with a stronger introduction to provide a "roadmap" to its content and to explain why these are the critical subjects to cover.

Finally, there is also a certain amount of variation in style and depth between the different subjects, a problem that is probably inevitable where six authors and ten subjects are involved. An example of this is where software product lines are really just introduced (with little guidance as to their application - which is actually quite tricky), while in contrast, the sections on agile modelling and SOA contain a lot of useful advice to guide their use.

These relatively minor gripes aside though, this is certainly a book to have on your bookshelf, if you are involved in the development of enterprise system architectures.

I'd also echo a previous reviewer's comment that the book is well produced, albeit with a few missing references.

The title 'A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture' led me to expect a book that dealt with the processes, challenges and techniques for creating an ENTERPRISE architecture. It does not. The book is about various technology frameworks. The Contents lists Systems Architectures, Solution Architectures and Service Oriented Architectures but not Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise Architecture is skimmed over in the Preface. The book barely touches on Zachman and Spewak and Hill. It ignores FEAF, TEAF, TOGAF, PERA, C4ISR, the Clinger-Cohen Act and other ENTERPRISE stuff completely. Enough said. Whatever this book is, is it is NOT a practical guide to ENTERPRISE Architecture. The book may be of use to technical architects designing solution-frameworks to support an Enterprise Architecture.

Completely missed the Enterprise side of the equation. As an introduction or practical guide this book is next to useless. I gave this book one star and someone it appeared as four !!!!!

In support of the heading, let's take a look at presented viewpoints. There is nothing besides famous 4+1 and a slight variation on the theme.
EA leaped forward during last 5 years, leaving presented material far behind.