Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 1: A System of Patterns

While I have argued since it came out that the G of 4 book is the most important programming book of the decade, I have to agree with the other, lone reviewer here, that this is a deeper, more mature work. I rediscovered this book when Alan Holub's series of recent articles began to appear in JavaWorld about implemnting UIs and I realized that he was taking a lot of his ideas from Buschman. One of the reasons I bring this up is that it made me realize that this is the great thing about this book: it dares to wrestle some of the complex issues and tradeoffs to the ground, presenting the reader with a more useable guide to the practice of implementing patterns. You may have read John Vlissides' (Go4 author) comments about how for years after the publication of his book he'd ask when he spoke who had read the book and nearly everyone would raise their hands, then he'd ask who wanted to come up and explain the momento pattern or the bridge and only a couple of people's hands would be raised. This is in part due to the fact that the Go4 book encourages the concept of simple ICs that can just be retrieved and plugged in. In reality, as anyone who has read Vlissides' other book which spends its whole duration talking just about Visitor, the opposite is true. Buschman's book is the best in this regard at spanning the range of design issues but still dealing with the complexities of implementation, and helping the reader through the process of assessing trade-offs and still matching requirements.

This is a good mix between Fowlers Patterns of Enterprise Applications and the Gang of Four book. It has more high level and complex patterns than the GOF book, but it is more easily digestible than the Fowler book (not that that book was that bad, but this is just better in that regard.)

Second best isn't bad when the #1 book changed forever the way software architecture is talked about. GoF is not only well-written, but it covers all the basic, most-used patterns. Everybody thereafter is going to have to either re-hash GoF, criticize it, or come up with new patterns which are not as fundamental.This book is full of new patterns, and fortunately they are good ones: Command, Broker, Layers and worth the price of the book in itself Presentation-Abstraction-Controller.PAC can be seen as a generalization and extension of Model/View/Controller. The Abstraction is the domain-specific part of the architecture, effectively the Model. The Presentation exposes the Model in some interesting way, either as a user-interface in which case it is a View, or as an API, in which case the Presentation becomes a new Abstraction used by the next level up. The Controller is left with the job of coordinating the Presentation and the Model. The key to the pattern is that PAC agents can be built up into layers with the Presentation API of each lower agent creating a higher abstraction for the next level. Thus PAC becomes MVC for all or your architecture, not just the UI.The book goes into this at length and adds useful discussion of MVC. Highly recommended.

First of all, you need to understand the patterns in the gang of four book before you attempt to read this one. They talk about them all over the place without explaining them. That's a warning, it didn't affect my review.The major thing I don't like about this book is the abstractness with which they talk. They give you a high level description of a pattern and leave you with that fogginess.I think the examples were poorly chosen. I would have prefered to have examples that are only as complicated as they needed to be. Unfortunately the book uses examples like, "We're going to make a voice recognition application" or "We're going to make an OS that can run applications that were built on Unix or WinNT or Linux". I think the intent was to have some real-world-I've-been-working-for-six-years examples... it would have been smarter to put the real world examples in a separate chapter and keep the design pattern explanations simple.Also, I hate the diagrams. They should have just copied the diagrams in the GoF book! Instead they chose these diagrams that give less info and IMO are downright ambiguous in some situations. Another thing the GoF book does is have 2 separate diagrams, one that's a (simple) real world example and another that's a diagram of the actual pattern. This book only has the diagram of the actual pattern.I disagree with those that say this book is better than the GoF book. I think what they like is the material covered. Material aside, the GoF book presents the information in a much clearer way. That's why I prefer the GoF book over this one.

This book is a perfect companion to "Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (the GoF book) and it is more didactical than the later.If you are new to patterns, I suggest that you first read this book and refer to "Design Patterns" when needed.In "Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture", there are some chapters on pattern and software architecture concepts, but most of the book is dedicated to describing architectural and design patterns (there are a few pages on idioms). Some of the architectural patterns are well known: layers, pipes, filters, broker and microkernel.The code is clear and written mainly in C++. The notations used are easy to understand (OMT notation is addopted for the object models and an adaptation of Message Sequence Charts to object interations).The production (cover, paper, etc) is excellent.

All buddy software engineers should focus not only on coding but also on software architecture. This is good book with comprehensive design patterns. I confidently recommend as I was professor teaching this subject earlier

I don't know how it happened but the copy that I got was not original. Pages started to detach from the book in a few days. Also, the content of book itself is not that good: pattern descriptions are too long and not always clear.

buena relación calidad precio y el libro es muy ameno de leer. Hasta es legible en el metro o en la playa como una novela :-)

Buon libro per avere una panoramica di tutte le architetture anche se forse in alcune punti spacca troppo il capello in 4....

Good job