Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture,   ISBN:9780321127426

Customer Rating: 

The Kindle Edition does NOT include any figures or diagrams. Quite an unpleasant surprise when reading passages like "The easiest way to see the difference is to look at the sequence diagrams for the two approaches (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).", clicking on those links and only finding a bare caption with no figure whatsoever. I contacted Amazon's customer service about this, and they replied with a mere "Occasionally, conversion to digital requires modification of content, layout, or format, including the omission of some images and tables". It would be great if Amazon worked together with the publishers to make it clear when there is missing content somewhere in its product page. Paying almost the price of the hardcover to end up with an incomplete product is unfair to say the least, and overall a bad experience for the reader.

Customer Rating: 

I'm surprised to see here that the first edition, which I just finished reading after letting it collect dust for several years, is still the current edition on the market. Seven years in the software development industry is a long time, and I feel that this book could use some refactoring. (I couldn't resist.) For example, the book refers to a "Plugin" pattern because "dependency injection," an industry-wide practice of decoupling interfaces from implementations and configuring them at runtime, hadn't become a common term at the time the book was written. The "service stub" pattern, one of whose benefits is described as enhanced testing, is now better known as mock objects, and this book doesn't mention the tools and libraries that have sprung up around generating mock objects to facilitate more insular unit testing. Finally, when discussing object-to-relational-database mapping patterns, the book makes recommendations about "buying" one but makes no mention of solid open source solutions available like Hibernate.

The book's loosely edited style and almost chatty, informal delivery prevents it from attaining the academic perfection that the original "instant classic" Gang of Four design patterns book earned. There is frequent phrasing like "my preference," "here at ThoughtWorks," and (my favorite) "at the moment I don't have a strong opinion either way." Martin Fowler is cool, and is a renowned software personality, which makes it easy to tolerate the familiarity, but at times I wished for slightly more rigorous editing.

The book's examples are a blend of Java and C#, and while this works fairly well to present a language-agnostic view of the patterns, this book doesn't avoid an occasional platform-specific side trail (like the judicious use of Enterprise Javabeans vs. plain Java objects). This sort of indiscretion has often marred patterns books that would otherwise have achieved more timelessness (for example, the book "Pattern Hatching," a followup to the classic Design Patterns books, spent an entire thick middle chapter dealing with workarounds to problems that occur only in C++).

Some of the patterns in this book would not have been hard to come up with: if you've built a vertical slice of a multitier enterprise application, you've almost certainly developed some of these patterns on your own. The value of patterns literature, of course, is in how it increases our shared design vocabulary, and to the extent that it helps us know what we mean when someone talks about "doing it with a Table Data Gateway," this book is a worthy addition to the literature. Overall, though, for me the book was less a series of profound "aha!" experiences and more of a catalog of "so that's what that's called" moments. A decent effort, but the new reader should be aware that it would benefit from some updates.

Customer Rating: 

Easy to read and understand the author.
Unfortunately, the book spends too much time and effort on ORM which is not very useful unless the reader intends to roll his own ORM tools.

Customer Rating: 

P of EAA is a bible for Enterprise Design Patterns.The patterns described in the book have become industry best practices with a lot of sources referring to these and providing solutions around these patterns.I would place this book in the category of best pattern books of all time along with the GOF and POSA.It is worth mentioning that anyone working on Enterprise Application Architecture will find this book as a very important weapon-one without which its difficult to win the battle-in their armory.

Customer Rating: 

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is an absolutely indispensable reference - if you're in the business of writing Enterprise Applications. Clearly and articulately presented, with lots of hard-won wisdom and insight - it's more topically relevant than to enterprise applications than the gang of four, etc - and of equally high quality.