Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach 1st Edition

This book is a fundacional stone to anyone who’s beginning their architecture career. If you got the chance to buy it or read it just go for it every page is building block in your understanding on software architecture

I read this book as an Associate SE and I gained a ton of knowledge. This book is extremely well written. I enjoyed the order in which the topics were presented. It began with an explanation of the four pillars in software architecture. By doing so readers gain immediate value within the first few pages. I particularly enjoyed the advocation for a domain partitioned folder structure as opposed to a technically partitioned folder structure, especially for front end developers. I believe navigating the code base should very much resemble navigating the UI. This is not only cool for readability, but it inherently increases cohesion. A huge win for such a low cost.After getting the foundations laid the authors explain different architecture styles. The part I found to be most useful was the charts they provided which give star ratings to highlight the strength and weaknesses of each architecture. This illustrates that architecture styles should be chosen for specific solutions and not trends. I gained the skills necessary to begin to think like an architect. It included breadth of knowledge which, as the book will tell you, is much more important than depth of knowledge for an architect. Then the authors decided to dive back in and elaborate a bit more on the foundations learned at the beginning. It suggested ADRs, another quick win for low costs. They also spoke about risks storming and offered friendly advice on finding balance within the teams.All in all, an amazing book. And at the end, the authors even presented tons of short answer questions to challenge readers and really take the lesson home.

Lacking education in software architecture, I've always desired to bridge that knowledge gap. I've attempted to learn through YouTube videos presented by university professors, but found them lacking. In an effort to enrich my understanding, I purchased this book. The authors, with their vast industry experience, provide invaluable insights. They emphasize the importance of breadth over depth in knowledge for architects and offer advice on navigating office politics to facilitate smooth team integration. The book intriguingly incorporates teachings from the ancient Chinese warrior, Sun Tzu, which I found particularly enlightening. This book has certainly satisfied my curiosity about software architecture.However, I did observe some shortcomings. I was anticipating a comprehensive exploration of a solid software architecture design example, but was disappointed. The book uses the failure of pets.com as a counter-example, and all the discussed cases pertain to web applications, like handling concurrent requests. Since software isn't exclusively about web apps, I found this to be a limitation. My personal project involves building a trading platform, and unfortunately, the book didn't provide much insight for this kind of venture, for which I had to deduct a point.As for the physical quality of the book, O'Reilly consistently delivers. The book feels good to hold and is printed in black and white. This isn't a problem, as all the images are legible without the need for color.

I'm not sure if it's the fact that I got burned by Building Evolutionary Architectures, co-authored by Neal Ford, or my previous experience with other "fundamentals" books which tended to be rather useless - my expectations were fairly low of this one but I'm glad I went ahead and read it.The book starts off by discussing what software architecture is, what the job entails, what the common misconceptions are and then for the remainder of the book covers both the technical and soft skills required for a person to become a good architect - how to maintain the technical know-how required by the job, what types of knowledge to focus on, how to detect, discuss and document the architecture, the reasons behind it and the trade-offs it entails, how to interact with your colleagues, both on the developer and the business side, how to resolve conflicts, nurture and promote constructive collaboration etc. So, as you can see, the authors try to cover a lot of ground without going too deep (and waking Durin's Bane) - and they do it successfully.That being said, the book isn't perfect, some chapters could have used more feedback, especially the event-driven architecture one, which felt a bit dated and like it came from someone who didn't have firsthand experience with it recently. Also, I can't really say that I truly discovered something new within its pages - which isn't necessarily a bad thing if, like here, the summary of the things you know is presented in such a way it actually reinforces the existing knowledge.

The book does a great job at deconstructing the overall role of a software architect in an enterprise scenario. It does this pretty gradual, starting with definitions for the characteristics of a software architecture and then elaborating clearly through architectural styles and skills that are favorablr in certain contexts.A definite must read for anyone looking to understand the abstractions involved in both software architecture at an enterprise level and the role of a software architect.

I read this book front to back and it solidified my understanding of a lot of architectural concepts. Now I'm better at understanding and communicating the architectural concerns of the systems I work on.If you're wondering where the blurry lines around architecture are, this book will help you build the mental model you're missing.Great writing, I'm keeping it as a reference book.

What is an architect? What do they do? What tools do they need? If you’re asking these questions, this is a fabulous place to start.