Sebastopol, CA—What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? Beautiful Architecture (O'Reilly, US $44.99), edited by Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios answers this question through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay, contributors present a notable software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose.
Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specific project, including decisions they faced and tradeoffs they made. Others take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have influenced computing as a whole. With this book, you'll discover:
- How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem
- The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolve
- How community processes within the KDE project help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems
- How creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated functionality
- The magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime
- Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the choice platform in high-availability environments for over two decades
- Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural views
- How architectures can affect the software's evolution and the developers' engagement
Beautiful Architecture brings you behind the scenes to learn what it takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the way you approach your own projects.
"The authors do a wonderful job in covering some of the fundamentals and best practices of software architecture, and they do so while also covering a wide spectrum of contemporary systems. I particularly enjoyed the range of architectures they touch on, from Emacs to Facebook, from higher ceremony systems to more ethereal ones.
"In short, this is a very timely and useful contribution to the art and the science, and the practice of software and architecture."
– Grady Booch, Fellow, IBM
For more information on this topic, be sure to check out O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo, taking place March 31 through April 3 in San Francisco.
For a review copy or more information please email kathrynb@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.
Georgios Gousios is a researcher by profession, a software engineer by education and a software enthusiast by passion. Currently, he is working on his PhD thesis at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece. His research interests include virtual machines, operating systems, software engineering and software quality.
Diomidis Spinellis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece. His research interests include software engineering, programming languages, internet information systems, computer security, and intelligent optimization methods.
Additional Resources:
For more information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517984
Diomidis Spinellis , Georgios Gousios
ISBN: 9780596517984, 426 pages, $44.99 USD, £34.50 GBP
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000
About O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.